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Why you hate to fly: thirty years ago this October, the era of affordable mass air travel was unleashed. Evan Sparks explains why this revolution stalled, and what can be done to finish it.

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Airline complaint one-upmanship is an old standby of small talk--"You had to wait six hours at the gate? That's nothing! I was wedged between two linebackers and the in-flight movie was the latest from Larry the Cable Guy." But is air travel really this bad? Travelers seem to think so. One measure finds that customer satisfaction with airlines is at its lowest point in three years; and the 2008 Airline Quality Rating, an aggregation of consumer complaints to the Department of Transportation, reports that complaints were up 60 percent since 2007.

Airlines seem to give travelers fewer reasons to smile. By mid-2008, many airlines had begun aggressive campaigns to bring in more cash through fees. Several airlines devalued their frequent flier miles, hiked the fees to book a "free" ticket, and started charging for checked baggage. New fees were added so fast that Southwest Airlines began running ads touting the fact that they merely had not added any fees.

And if the fees weren't enough, fares are rising as airlines follow through on promised capacity cuts, trimming routes and frequencies. With fewer seats, passengers have fewer options and face higher fares to match record jet fuel prices.

But it's not just the airlines. The Federal Aviation Administration operates an air traffic control system that cannot keep up with demand for air travel, forcing delays in congested airspace and airports, especially in the northeast United States. Many airlines now add several minutes to a flight's travel time, thus lowering the odds of having the flight reported as delayed and lowering passengers' expectations.

The FAA is not the only agency aggravating travelers. The Transportation Security Administration, the hastily constructed bureaucratic response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, has become what some experts call "security theater," a show of rigorous inspection whose primary function is to make us feel safer.

So if we increasingly hate air travel, who's to blame? The unlikely bogeyman dujour is airline deregulation, which culminated with the signing of the Airline Deregulation Act by President Carter 30 years ago on October 24, 1978. Long praised by economists as pro-competition and consumer-friendly, airline deregulation is now under attack for allegedly hurting airlines and travelers.

For example, James Oberstar (D-Minnesota), the powerful chairman of the House Transportation Committee, warned the airline industry in April that "public patience is running out" and that Congress might feel the need to "reregulate" the industry. And in a speech at the Wings Club in New York in June, former American Airlines CEO Robert L. Crandall called for just that: "Three decades of deregulation have demonstrated that airlines have special characteristics incompatible with a completely unregulated environment." He...

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