How We Can Make the Skies Friendlier: Five Steps

Throttle Forward
You can press a button in your car and link up to a satellite-based guidance system, but you can't do that in a $100 million aircraft. The FAA has scores of time-saving proposals, such as data-link communications and airspace redesign, but it is slogging through the years-long approval process. Congress has for the first time provided significant money, and FAA Administrator Jane Garvey has lighted a fire under the agency, but technological improvements should come much faster. The airline industry isn't breathing down the FAA's neck to get global-positioning systems installed, in part because of the equipment's costs, but it should be, since it will save money in the long run.

Controllers should be allowed to adjust safety standards that were set 45 years ago. They could, for example, tighten the distance between jets from the current five miles to, say, 4.5 miles or even less. Controllers say they could make the system much more efficient--and still keep safety first.

Abolish the Faa
There. We said it. Once the throwaway line of antigovernment fanatics, this proposal isn't so far out anymore. Repeated budget overruns and bureaucratic bungling--the FAA is spending $5 million to rebuild the tower at Miami airport because controllers couldn't see the runways clearly--has led to cries that the FAA must go.

Or at least have its role reduced. More than a dozen countries--including Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany--have either fully or partly privatized air-traffic services. Four-year-old NavCanada, for example, has cut costs, increased productivity and protected safety.

Mergers or not, until at least some of this happens, we'll continue to be vulnerable to a system that is always just a thunderstorm away from paralysis. So pack some patience and a plump book before you leave for the airport this summer. You'll need both. And have a nice flight.