Dredging this one back up - I looked through recent Delta policies and didn't find the above cited rule in this thread:
116Ea in the international contract of carriage:
a) Connection Time Exceeding Four Hours
Overnight Layover in ATL with Checked bags
Parents are flying from NRT-HNL-ATL with a long layover in HNL. It's a valid routing on single PNR. The layover scheduled is just over 8 hours, about 9am to 5pm HNL local.
NRT - HNL DL 180
HNL - ATL DL 836
They were forced to short check at NRT and were wondering why they had to do that, their plans were to do a little sight seeing during their layover and didn't want to lug their bags around. Thanks for the help!