Ground and Express have moved each others’s freight for decades. Express has flown Ground freight just like they fly freight for all their customers. Ground pays Express for this service just like every customer.
Express contracts out some of it’s deliveries to third party companies. They’ve done that for decades. They use Ground for that service now just like any other cartage company. Express pays Ground for this service.
Just because you hope the legal lines are blurred doesn’t mean that they are. The relationship between the companies is clear and straightforward. The teamsters will not be storming into court to change the law because they know that would be a giant waste of resources.
DOT operating authorities are granted on the basis of certain boundaries and operating conditions that define who that carrier is, the market it serves operates in and cannot operate in. Just because you're a very large carrier albeit the poorest damn setup in the history of wheeled transportation it doesn't give you the right to do whatever you damn well please.
So how's this going to work out in the rural areas? The airport that would supply air box to the terminal I was at is a little and I'm not sure you could call it regional other than the fact that it has a 24 hour FBO is 70 miles away. Now even if the plane's on time given the distance it's still not going to arrive after that 70 mile trip until 10:30 or later. And who will have to bear the cost of making that 140 mile round trip? Probably some contractor and the other contractors will likely take a settlement deduction to pay the cost based on the number of air boxes that are his.
Now Ground guys simply cannot wait around until 10:30-11 to be released. So the end result? That contractor will have to pay a guy in a very lightly loaded truck to go run air box for a few hours but will quickly have to turn around and start doing pickups if he wants to get back in time to send those handful air boxes out in time. That contractor is going to absolutely lose his arse .
The problem has always been is that Raj Fat Freddy IWBF and others still think that the whole world is one great big metropolis . That all routes are the compact high density close to the terminal 25-30 total daily miles they think exists everywhere . It's the only thing they know. They don't understand, know or perhaps don't want to know that 25-30 number is still 10 times that amount of miles out in rural America. As a result they think that they can just toss that air box onto a close in contractor for pennies in the way of additional pay because in the word's we hear from them way too often....."you're going right past it".