The new formula for staying aloft.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Tom Belden

Two decades ago, and just five years into an experiment called airline deregulation, pundits were using the word "oligopoly" to describe what they saw happening.

Within a few years, the observers opined, the industry would be OPEC-like, controlled by as few as three huge global airlines. Hanging around the edges would be a few smaller carriers, feeding passengers to the big guys or occupying niches that didn't attract the heavyweights.

Oh, how cloudy those crystal balls were. Evolution has indeed taken place, as it inevitably does in business, but not in ways many people foresaw.

Two developments brought the industry to its current financial turmoil _ one of them something the big airlines should have seen before it ran them over, the other something that few people predicted until the late 1990s. What the older airlines missed was the growing anger of business travelers, who had tired of paying almost $3,000 to fly coast to coast _ in coach _ at the last minute. At the same time, airlines large and small began selling their flights on the Internet, unwittingly giving customers, in effect, the power to set prices. And when customers have that power, ...