More significantly, weight-based fees don’t factor in the time or date when a plane lands, yet every traveler knows the difference between landing on a Wednesday night in September and landing on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. This is a problem that Alfred Kahn foresaw even before deregulation. (He compared it to charging the same per-pound price for different cuts of beef.) Kahn implored the Federal Aviation Administration to implement some kind of congestion-pricing system back then, and 30 years later he’s amazed that it still hasn’t happened. “It was perfectly clear at the time that we had an insane system,” he says. “You have to price your services based on the burden a plane puts on the system.”

But politicians and the Air Transport Association, the principal lobbying group for the airline industry, hate the idea of charging fees based on landing times. They’ve strongly opposed congestion pricing every time it’s come up for debate at congressional hearings. David Castelveter, vice president of communications for the A.T.A., says it’s just another tax on the airlines. Still, hope springs. In July, the Department of Transportation approved a regulatory change that would give airports the explicit right to charge higher fees for planes landing at busier times. So far, no airport has done so.

Another fix would be to revamp U.S. bankruptcy laws so that they can be applied more specifically—and punitively—to airlines. It’s hard to think of another industry in which almost every major player has gone through Chapter 11 reorganization. Some have been through it twice: US Airways filed in 2002, came out of the process in 2003, and filed again in 2004. Yet all of these carriers are back on the streets—or in the skies—and continuing to leak money. United Airlines spent more than three years in bankruptcy, finally emerging in 2006. (The restructuring dragged on for so long that the federal government actually did tweak the bankruptcy code to prevent the process from taking longer than 18 months.) No one today would call that a success: United negotiated new labor contracts, terminated its pension plans, and based its profit outlook through 2010 on an oil price of $45 to $50 a barrel. It’s projected to lose about $1.2 billion this year.

Because of the huge implications for employees, the government can’t legally force any of these companies to be liquidated. But we’d all be a little happier at the airport if it did so once in a while. Right now, Chapter 11 is the financial equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card for airlines that allows struggling companies to wipe away their debts—and immediately start to build new ones. “There used to be a stigma about bankruptcy; now it’s a strategy,” says Southwest’s Kelly. “There are essentially no barriers to entry and a lot of barriers to exit. You end up with a lot of inefficient capacity out there.” Instead of letting an airline simply restructure its debts, creditors should be able to offer an alternative plan, making liquidation a realistic option.

Finally, the fix with the most widespread support in the industry has less to do with regulation and more to do with engineering—revamping the country’s air traffic control technology. No other proposal has such broad support or makes so much sense. “The far better public-policy discussion is not should you regulate or reregulate but about a modern air traffic control system,” says Northwest Airlines C.E.O. Doug Steenland.

Operated by the F.A.A., the current system is almost comically outdated. “It’s the equivalent of using a typewriter,” says the A.T.A.’s Castelveter. Even wristwatches now have G.P.S. satellite technology, yet planes still navigate with ground-based radar that was installed back in the 1950s. A much publicized glitch in the flight-plan system in August led to hours-long delays for hundreds of planes and would have been worse if it had happened at a peak travel time. The system requires thousands of F.A.A. employees manning air traffic centers—flights get passed from person to person along their route, from takeoff to landing—and it’s less precise than satellite technology. That imprecision requires greater distance between planes, which eats up precious time and airspace, further exacerbating the traffic problems caused by all the unnecessary planes flying around right now.