Reregulation fantasy: another critic of airline deregulation misses the mark.

• Author: Poole, Robert W., Jr.
• Position: Attention All Passengers: The Airlines' Dangerous Descent--and How to Reclaim Our Skies - Book review

Attention All Passengers : The Airlines' Dangerous Descent--and How to Reclaim Our Skies, by William J. McGee, HarperCollins, 368 pages, $26.99

ABOUT TWICE a decade someone comes along with a book denouncing airline deregulation as a threat to safety. It always turns out that what the author is really lamenting is the loss of monopoly wages and benefits for the employees of a formerly cartelized industry. This year's installment in that ongoing series is travel reporter William McGee's Attention All Passengers.

Compared to some of the previous contributors to the genre (Ralph Nader, John Nance, Mary Schiavo), McGee has done a credible job of research, interviewing aviation experts, and presenting a selection of their views, even when they conflict with his thesis. But instead of confronting their points, he simply proceeds with his own argument, untroubled.

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Here is the tall tale McGee wants us to buy: Back in the 1960S and '70s, the airlines were wonderful places to work. (McGee was a dispatcher at "the world's greatest airline," Pan Am.) Flying was a pleasure for passengers: free meals, leg room, numerous empty seats, big planes going to small towns, etc. Then along came this thing called deregulation, with the ensuing dog-eat-dog competition kicking off a downward spiral that has continued to this day, worsening dramatically during the last decade.

Fares are so low now that airlines chronically lose money, forcing them to slash their work forces by outsourcing just about everything (even heavy maintenance, some of which is now done overseas!), automating the check-in process, and jamming their planes to more than 80 percent of capacity. They have abandoned small towns and cities to regional airlines with poor safety records and small, uncomfortable planes.

McGee's remedy? "Partial" reregulation, tougher antitrust enforcement, a ban on offshore maintenance, an overhaul of bankruptcy laws, and much more.

McGee's critique suffers from internal inconsistency. Generally he laments the airlines' broken business model, which can't seem to make profits. Yet he also complains that the airlines have "virtually unlimited resources" for lobbying and influencing public opinion. Even while bemoaning airlines' profitability problems, he carps throughout the book about their significant productivity gains in recent decades, thanks to technology (online booking, check-in kiosks), outsourcing of various functions to lower-cost...