Where’s Gerard Arpey? The CEO of AMR, the parent company of American Airlines, should have been far, far more visible during this difficult past week for the airline. Other than appearing at one press conference at the company’s headquarters in Dallas on Thursday, the man has been virtually out of sight, and not in a good way. What is he thinking?

While news programs aired stories about entire high school classes camping out at O’Hare, and while grieving families missed funerals because they were stranded at La Guardia (actually, I’m making that one up, but it’d be surprising if it didn’t happen somewhere), AMR executives were AWOL.

The public relations guru for those in distress, Howard Rubenstein, calls it “the worst public relations disaster since they invented the airplane.”

Remember last year’s JetBlue debacle? The company, a longtime favorite of Palm Beach commuters known for its efficiency, stranded and refused to feed passengers for hours on a snowy day last winter. At the time, Mr. Rubenstein complimented JetBlue’s efforts to address the situation. “The CEO, or whoever is advising him, has good promotional instincts,” he said.

That was true. JetBlue issued a “Customer Bill of Rights,” gave out free tickets, and was so abjectly apologetic that most passengers ended up mollified.

In contrast, AMR’s leadership seems convinced that passengers will blame its recent cancellation of thousands of flights on the FAA. That government agency apparently refused to give AMR extra time to fix some improperly wrapped wiring bundles; normally, it seems, failures to comply with such requirements are treated more leniently. Well, that certainly makes me feel better.

AMR’s seeming indifference to the many hardships (yes, not being able to attend a wedding, get to a new job, visit an ailing relative, etc. — all those do involve hardship) would not be so infuriating if we, the traveling public, were convinced that the airlines generally did their best to get us to our destinations on time. I, for one, don’t believe that they do. I believe the airlines routinely plan too many flights at certain airports, even knowing they will consequently experience delays, and that they often cancel half-full flights to maximize the efficiency of their fleets. I believe that they regularly schedule connections that are guaranteed to have you and your baggage part ways, and I firmly believe that they order too few of the most popular meals quite on purpose. Actually, I can’t imagine that that’s true, but if not, then why do they inevitably run out of the steak dinner by row 12? (Wait — what am I thinking — steak dinners?)

How can we exact better, more passenger-pleasing performance from the airlines? It’s tough, because it is at best a marginally profitable industry. Of late, soaring fuel prices have again tipped the companies into the red. Survival-style mergers (Delta and Northwest, for example) are again in the news, as are bankruptcies. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.

The president of one of the regional airlines, who is on the board of a major company, tells me he has some ideas (not for attribution) about how to make the industry healthier. Most important, he points to airspace and airport congestion as a major problem. When President Carter deregulated the airlines in 1978, the rules about scheduling flights into most busy airports were set aside. Now, with the exception of just a few airports such as La Guardia and Reagan National that have assigned landing slots, it’s a free-for-all.

“We need to regulate congestion, which is a huge part of passenger anger,” this insider says. “The Northeast air space is in perpetual gridlock.”

Although the airlines acknowledge the problem, any carrier that voluntarily reduces its flights will lose market share.

“If any one carrier cuts back to help, it won’t prevent another from adding flights,” he explains. In other words, if Delta decides to play good citizen and eliminate flights out of Dallas, American can move in and take the empty spots, adding to its share. How screwy is that?

There are efforts afoot to address the situation. Some policymakers argue that we should reregulate the airlines. Others, mindful of the total bureaucratic inertia that gripped the industry in the 1970s, suggest using market forces to solve the issue. For instance, a former president of Lockheed Air Terminal, Viggo Butler, and Robert Poole Jr., of the Reason Foundation, have written extensively on the need to auction landing slots, in effect putting a price on both the number of landings and on the most desirable schedules.

In fact, the FAA in December announced some measures intended to ease travel delays during the holidays. They gingerly suggested that some of the most delay-prone airports, such as Kennedy and Newark, might embrace “congestion” pricing. Little progress seems to have been made, though yesterday Senator Schumer put it toward the top of his “to do” list.

Messrs. Poole and Butler also argue for implementation of new GPS and computer technologies that, they say, could significantly expand the number of flights accommodated by existing facilities. (In effect, they argue that with today’s guidance and communications technology, airplanes can safely fly closer to one another. Couldn’t we just build some new runways instead?)

Airport congestion is of course only one of the problems faced by the airline industry. The companies are also battling constant labor issues, high fixed costs, and, as mentioned earlier, escalating oil prices.

“Nobody could possibly be profitable at $100 oil,” our industry executive says. “Oil could be as high as 40% of total costs this year.”

With all these difficulties, this participant says: “Any level of actual profitability is temporary.”

These are surely tough times for airline companies. Public sympathy for the industry’s problems, already thin, no doubt all but disappeared at the hands of American’s execrable performance last week. The industry should be on notice that infuriating their passengers will only make their problems worse.

“They thought they could skate through this,” Mr. Rubenstein says, “but they lost a couple of wheels off their skateboard.”

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