(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHICH DO YOU hate more? Sitting around a crowded airport for hours wondering when your miserable flight will take off? Or roasting on the tarmac for an hour or two while the sun beats down and makes everything inside the cabin nice and ripe? How about that knotted-up, helpless feeling you get when you are still up in the clouds staring out the window while a very important client in a city far, far away is wondering where on earth (or in the air) you are? Just about everyone who flies has lived through such nightmares, and things are likely to get worse. Though a rash of reckless near misses and blunders have put air safety into the headlines, the main drama of the cluttered skies lies elsewhere. It is still the desperation of the discommoded traveler. The airlines, struggling to digest mergers and cut costs, are only partly to blame. The U.S. air traffic control system, that vast complex of people and equipment designed to keep flights moving safely and smoothly, has fallen into flagrant disarray. The system has never recovered from the illegal and ill- fated strike called in 1981 by PATCO, the now defunct controllers' union. After more than six years, the Federal Aviation Administration has still not adequately replaced the 11,300 controllers fired by President Reagan. Despite a 26% increase in traffic during the period, there are some 2,600 fewer controllers on the job. Only about 70% of today's controllers have been trained to so-called full-performance level, meaning that they can handle all the duties required, compared with a pre-strike figure of about 81%. Nor has the FAA responded to the challenge of replacing the system's antiquated technology. ''The people there always seem to be waiting for the next good thing to come around the corner,'' says Congressman Norman Mineta, chairman of the House aviation subcommittee. FAA officials say they are not to blame, and forecast more painful days ahead. ''If traffic continues to grow and airlines continue to schedule as they do, I would expect delays to grow proportionately,'' warns Norbert Owens, an FAA deputy associate administrator. That evades the issue. The air traffic growth has been dramatic, and the airlines do tend to schedule many flights at times most attractive to their customers. But both the schedules and the surge in traffic were predictable years ago. The principal problem has been the FAA's inability to streamline its old-fashioned, bureaucratic management techniques, along with its persistent role as stooge in struggles between the legislative and executive branches. Continual changes at the controls have not helped. Last month T. Allan McArtor, a former Federal Express executive, became the agency's fifth chief in the past 12 years. NOW SOME qualified good news: Just about everyone familiar with the system argues that flying the U.S. skies remains relatively safe. Indeed, the major reason for those delays is that controllers and other workers refuse to take risks by overburdening the system. Yet safety problems could begin cropping up before long if traffic keeps growing as it has. Reported near misses have been rising, and so, presumably, have been unreported ones (pilots are not required to report these events).The most alarming recent near miss, between a Delta L1011 and a Continental 747 over the North Atlantic, did not reflect on the air traffic system since it took place far from controlled airspace. Collisions are generally unlikely over oceans; in this case, the problem may have resulted from a pilot's error in punching information into a navigation computer. But the episode was one of four notable mishaps that plagued Delta, an airline with a generally superior reputation, in a period of just three weeks, and it served as a reminder that something can go wrong in the air at any time. Late last spring the National Transportation Safety Board warned that over the past year the combination of too much traffic and too few controllers had produced more near collisions both in the air and on the ground. The board blamed the overextended system for the crash of an Aeromexico jetliner last August near Los Angeles that killed 82. In response, the FAA promised to restrict flights at airports where traffic regularly exceeds capacity at peak hours -- meaning still more inconvenience for the traveler. In July a board staffer told Congress that during June controller errors, such as allowing aircraft to fly closer than the legal limit, had increased by 50% over the previous year. Passengers are fed up with the general decline of service. The Transportation Department received nearly as many complaints in June as it did for the entire first half of 1986. Leading the list of miscreants: Continental, Eastern, and Northwest. Threatened with laws that would require them to report service lapses, most major airlines say they are willing to give the Transportation Department information about delays, cancellations, and lost baggage. At least some changes may be under way soon. Congress and the airline industry are pressing hard to bolster the system with new technology. Various pieces of legislation now being considered would force the FAA to start tapping the Aviation Trust Fund, a $5.7-billion pool financed largely through an 8% tax on airline tickets and through fuel taxes. The fund is supposed to pay for modernizing both the air traffic control system and the nation's airports. To help keep the budget deficit down, the Reagan Administration has until now found it convenient not to allocate most of the trust fund. Not least important, the controllers have approved the formation of a new union, the first since the 1981 strike, and one of the group's most urgent priorities will be to increase staffing. ( Things were not supposed to work out this way. When the controllers struck and were fired in 1981, the FAA and the Reagan Administration won public and congressional support by promising a broad array of improvements. A task force chaired by Lawrence M. Jones, then president of the Kansas-based Coleman Co., identified ''a rigid and insensitive system of people management within the FAA.'' The agency, vowing to improve management-labor relations, set up a series of committees and study groups. About the same time, the FAA unveiled its $12-billion, ten-year National Airspace System Plan to upgrade the system's technology with a new generation of computers and advanced devices. Among them: Doppler weather radar, which gives advance warning of wind shears, and microwave landing systems, which would assist pilots during bad weather. FAA officials said they would rapidly replace the fired controllers, but argued that fewer people would be needed because of all the wondrous new technology that would be coming. IMMEDIATELY AFTER the strike, the system worked reasonably well. Supervisors and the controllers who had crossed the picket lines pitched in to keep the operation going under crisis conditions. They were helped by the recession, which severely cut air traffic. But after a year or so relations began to revert to previous patterns, even as traffic picked up again. Supervisors, many of whom had learned their trade in the military, lapsed back into their old autocratic managerial style. Controllers began to gripe about working six days a week under fierce stress. No one watched all this with more interest than John F. Thornton, a former PATCO leader who was fired in the wake of the 1981 controllers' strike. After a brief fling at selling life insurance, he had settled in as an organizer with the American Federation of Government Employees. By the end of 1983 he was getting regular phone calls from controllers looking for help in recreating a union. Says Thornton: ''They were citing some of the same reasons that brought on the strike. Overtime, stress, morale -- all the issues that were not being attended to.'' Early in 1986, Thornton began gathering signatures for a new union. In June the controllers voted by more than 2 to 1 to approve the organization, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA). Thornton, 42, who spent ten days in jail and paid a $1,000 fine for his role as president of the Washington local in the 1981 strike, speaks in markedly unmilitant tones these days and swears he does not intend to call for another strike. But he will be seeking many changes in the way his members are treated by management. Among them is a restoration of procedures that used to provide professional protection for controllers. During the PATCO era, for example, a controller could disclaim his role in committing an error if his supervisor had ordered him to space planes more closely than the rules allowed. Today he is held responsible. Thornton will also be pushing for controller representation on accident-investigation boards, and seeking a far more active role for his members in choosing and developing new equipment. Says he: ''All the employees want is to be heard, to be treated as professionals, and to have some impact on the system.'' Thornton argues that morale was bad enough in the old PATCO days, when most controllers had been trained in the military and were at least accustomed to rigid and hierarchical behavior from their supervisors. Now only about 20% of the controller force comes from the military -- 42% are college graduates, and the proportion is growing -- and supervisors have to learn to be more flexible. Thornton acknowledges that it will be tough to change the old habits, especially since managers generally bubble up from the controller ranks. ''Being a controller is not the greatest training for being a manager,'' he says. ''You're used to telling people what to do, how to do it, and when to do it -- and then expecting immediate compliance.'' The training the FAA provides is little help. Most supervisors are now put through a course in Lawton, Oklahoma, that is so successful in transforming congenial colleagues into tyrants that controllers call it the Lawton Lobotomy. The FAA is also trying to help ease the tensions. Any tower or control center manager who decides his problems are getting out of hand can draw on the agency's nascent organizational development staff to help set up dialogues between supervisors and controllers. Candidates at centers in the Northwest and the Southwest are now ranked partly by their peers for supervisory potential. Another plan, which is being started experimentally, will allow controllers a voice in evaluating their supervisors' peformance. Various human relations committees are also meeting at most of the system's towers and centers. But FAA officials concede the committees have yet to help much. Says Charles E. Weithoner, the FAA's chief of human resource management: ''It's easy to work on where to have the company picnic, but how to increase communication is a much harder nut to crack.'' Adds Thornton: ''They can sit and talk about how much a cup of coffee should cost in the office or where the microwave should be placed. But they can't talk about staffing, about the effect of overtime on morale, about the equipment that must be replaced.'' At the busiest airports, controllers often put in eight or more hours a week of overtime, and argue that the time-and-a-half pay does not compensate for the extra stress. New chairman McArtor says improving management techniques is one of his top priorities. Management and labor agree heartily that the system will never recover without more controllers and new technology. Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole announced plans to hire 580 new trainees in early June, but Thornton and some congressional critics of the FAA contend that at least 3,000 controllers are needed on top of the 13,632 now at work. Since roughly half the trainees typically drop out, some 6,000 new hires might be required to fill the ranks. Some Congressmen and airline executives have urged that the FAA consider rehiring fired PATCO employees. But such a move would require bending or rewriting federal laws. Besides, FAA officials remain adamantly opposed, and Thornton says he would have to poll his membership before agreeing. At least some of the newer controllers might fight the move in fear of losing seniority. FAA officials point proudly to technological innovations such as a new higher-capacity computer recently installed in the Seattle traffic center that covers roughly 350,000 square miles of the Pacific Northwest, and the agency's new headquarters system in Washington, D.C., which allows technicians to view all U.S. traffic on one computer screen for the first time. But many more such innovations are overdue. Congressman Mineta estimates that the FAA is at least two years and $1.5 billion behind schedule in implementing the National Airspace System Plan. He and others in Congress argue that there's little hope of progress until it is somehow forced back on track. The agency will not get either the controllers or the technology it needs without much more money from the Aviation Trust Fund. Mineta has proposed that the fund be removed as an item in the federal budget so its surplus could not be used to reduce the deficit. He also calls for trimming ticket taxes if the surplus is allowed to grow past certain levels. But his bills face an uphill fight. Airline executives have suggested more radical solutions. One proposal, that the industry take the leading role in managing the FAA, got nowhere in the face of congressional skepticism about how well safety concerns and the profit motive might mix. More recently, the airlines have put forward a plan to spin off the FAA as a quasi-independent federal corporation such as the Postal Service or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The agency would still answer to Congress but would be self-supporting; the industry would have a voice through a technical advisory board. Such a body, airline executives say, could better tame its bureaucracy, would be more likely to enjoy continuity in top management, and would not be financially hamstrung. Argues William F. Bolger, president of the Air Transport Association, the industry's main lobbying organization in Washington: ''We need to get the air traffic control system and airport operations out of the budgetary process and out of partisan politics.'' Even if they are put into effect, the proposed measures will not be enough. Bolger estimates that the scheduled airlines will be carrying 600 million passengers annually by the mid-1990s, vs. this year's 450 million. No matter how efficiently the system operates while planes are in the air, it breaks down if there are not enough places for them to land. The problem is that no major airport has been built in the U.S. for about 15 years because of fierce environmental opposition and the huge expenses of such projects. Denver is committed to building a new $3-billion airport, and Cincinnati and Nashville plan to add runways. But the most urgent need is for additional airports near major traffic centers such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where delays and tie-ups quickly cascade through the entire system. Civic and government leaders in all these cities for years have been talking about laying down more concrete, but no programs have gone past the preliminary stage. For the poor airline passenger, the result will almost surely be more delays and more frustration. Is reregulation the answer, as critics increasingly suggest? Not likely. Deregulation has made flying possible for more people than ever before. What's needed is sharper management, along with adequate investment to underpin this new wave of consumption -- the billions of dollars that will pay for the & people, the technology, and the bricks and mortar to make the skies safer and less crowded.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: RODNEY E. MIMS SOURCE: FAA CAPTION: Lagging behind: Commercial passenger flights have increased 26% since 1980, but the number of controllers qualified for flight operations is still 24% below the prestrike level. DESCRIPTION: Passenger airline flights per air traffic controller, 1980-1986. Color photograph of airplane and airport control tower.