Flew to Sig Academy last week. Chose to fly direct to Portland rather than change planes to get to Manchester. Added an hour drive, but saved 4+ hours in air ports.
Carrying a P365 handgun, 10 magazines, 300 rounds of ammo, holster, mag carriers, eyes and ears.
Check in at ATL. Easy Peasy. Showed Delta ticket agent the gun was unloaded, signed the red card to put on top of case. Then I had to take to the bag over to the TSA-Oversized bag room (50' away). They scanned it in their xray and said, "Good to go." The Delta app notified me when it was loaded on the plane
Baggage Claim at PWM. Portland is a small and friendly airport. Strolled down to baggage claim, found "the" Delta agent on duty. The Delta app just notified me the bag was in Baggage Claim. Agent checked my ID, zip tied my bag shut then gave it to me. I should have right then and there broken the zip tie and inspected the bag to make sure the gun hadn't been removed, but based on weight I was sure it was there.
RETURN TRIP:
Check in at PWM. The only difference is once I checked my bag in the ticket agent pages TSA to come to the ticket counter for inspection. BUT they have a 10 minute policy. If the TSA doesn't show with in 10 minutes they put it on the conveyer belt anyway. I used the time to call my family. TSA never showed. Good to go. Same drill with Delta App. Notified me when bag was loaded on plane.
Baggage Claim at ATL. Besides waiting an hour for Delta to unload the bags and get them to Baggage Claim. Just showed my ID and took my bag.
NOTES:
First I used a far too big a hard case, a Pelican, that took up too much room and was too heavy for just one small hand gun. While I ended up stripping out most of the padding and putting everything I could in there it was big time over kill. Picture below before I took out more foam and put in more items.
Delta, as of this week, still allows 11# of ammo, though nobody actually checked it. I packed 300 rounds, well under the limit.
The only thing that has to be in the hard case is the gun.
I think you can carry small nail clippers in your carry on. I advise to do so for the zip-tie happy agents.
PS Delta app failed at ATL on return. Their whole flight schedule that day was screwed up and things out of wack. So 30 minutes after I claimed my bag I got two advisories. First one was that I had taken off from PWM and the second was that my bag was at bag claim. What I saw the guy doing at bag claim was batching up all the bar codes to scan later. Kinda defeats the usefulness of the system.