To be clear, we’re not calling for socialism or even a return to 1970s-style regulation. From the late 1930s until 1978, the Civil Aeronautics Board, the organization Kahn dismantled, set fares for all airlines in the country. Carriers were guaranteed a 12 percent return on any flight that was at least 55 percent full. The C.A.B. also controlled routes and decided which airlines got to fly where. Critics of regulation dismiss that era, saying it didn’t allow any new competition, though that’s not exactly true; startup airlines did appear, but most promptly died because of the bureaucratic struggle for routes. Southwest Airlines launched in the late 1960s and endured four years of court battles before its first plane could take off. (A lot of the company’s early success was due to co-founder Herb Kelleher’s background as a lawyer.)

But a few policy changes today would go a long way toward fixing some of the industry’s biggest problems. Specifically, what’s most needed is some form of congestion pricing, a tougher set of bankruptcy laws for airlines, and an improved air traffic control system. All three initiatives would reduce traffic and delays and allow the smartest competitors to actually make money in this business. And because the aviation system is so complicated and requires such steep investments in infrastructure, all three would require the government to step in.

Free-market advocates say that any government intervention can only make things worse. “The fundamental challenge the airline industry faces and always will face is to match passenger capacity with demand,” says Clifford Winston, an economist at the Brookings Institution, which is generally opposed to regulation in any industry. “They had little practice doing this under regulation. Since they deregulated, they’ve had problems trying to accurately forecast the business cycle.” Which is perhaps understating the problem a bit. After 30 years and a cumulative net loss of more than $22.3 billion for the airlines, it’s reasonable to ask if their problems are really due to a lack of practice or if the cause is something more systemic—and something that a new set of operating rules might be able to fix.

Some of the proposals aimed at making the skies less crowded are, frankly, a little nuts. For example, Crandall suggests, among other things, that passengers on connecting flights should always pay more than they would for nonstop flights. That’s the opposite of how fares currently work, and it makes an odd kind of sense: Connections cost airlines more in fuel and put a greater burden on the system in that they require twice as many gates and runways. But this is the kind of overly complicated scheme that drives conservatives into tirades, and it would be impossible to implement. “There’s no practical logic,” says Horan. “You’re charging for a lower-quality product.”

A better solution would be to reduce traffic while still letting carriers fly where they want and charge what they want. The best approach currently floating around the industry is some form of congestion pricing, in which the airlines would be financially penalized for jamming flights into the busiest times of day. For decades, airlines have paid landing fees to airports based primarily on a plane’s weight. (For a full Boeing 737-800 at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, the landing fee is about $1,060, which gets passed along to consumers as part of their fares.) But those fees encourage airlines to use smaller planes, which are generally less fuel-efficient than bigger aircraft and carry fewer people, yet put the same burden on runways, gates, and airspace. In 2002, La Guardia handled 240 flights a day with fewer than 100 seats; today, there are more than 300 such flights. At Kennedy Airport, the number of these flights has more than doubled during the same time period. It’s akin to a bunch of commuters each driving themselves to work instead of carpooling.