A rash of close calls on runways at major airports and a surge in flight delays are raising new questions about why the FAA has taken so long to modernize the air-traffic system—and to groom a new generation of controllers to handle the increasingly crowded skies. Barbara S. Peterson reports on the view from inside the control tower

In early April, as massive flight cancellations brought on by an obscure aircraft maintenance issue stranded hundreds of thousands of airline passengers, a frightening near-miss occurred at one of the nation's busiest airports. A tug towing a 777 toward a maintenance hangar entered a busy runway at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. The air-traffic controller warned the tug operator that an American Airlines MD-80 was landing, but the weight of the 777 prevented the tug from stopping. The American pilot swerved to avoid the 777, missing it by some 25 feet, according to witnesses in the control tower. The incident received scant media attention amid all the furor over the passenger strandings, though it followed several other near-collisions in recent months at some large airfields. One of the most dramatic occurred in January in San Diego, where an air-traffic controller cleared a Southwest jet for takeoff unaware that another plane had stalled on the runway (see "Anatomy of a Disaster Averted"). Safety experts say these and other incidents are of far more urgent concern than the wiring bundles that were the focus of the recent by-the-book inspections by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

From January 2007 through March of this year, the FAA reported 441 runway incursions—defined as the "incorrect presence" of a plane or other moving object on a runway being used for takeoffs and landings. The number of these deemed serious (meaning there was a strong likelihood of a crash) more than doubled, to 15, in recent months from the same period a year earlier. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), over 800 passengers came within seconds of a deadly accident during that time.

In response to the recent string of runway incursions, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress's investigative unit, launched a probe of runway safety. Its pointed report, issued last December, painted a bleak picture: The traveling public is relying on an air-traffic-control system that's underfunded, straining at its seams, and dependent on outmoded technology and a workforce on the verge of a major upheaval. The report largely blamed a lack of leadership at the FAA for the current runway safety issues, and, by extension, for a far greater lapse: the failure to prepare for a future full of challenges that promise to make today's crises pale by comparison. Aviation forecasters are predicting an almost unimaginable boom in air travel: one billion passengers in the United States by 2015, up from some 700 million today, and more than 12,000 commercial airliners in the skies by 2025, up from about 7,000 today—to be joined by an estimated 6,000 new microjets and other private aircraft. While the FAA makes much of the new air-traffic technology that is on the way, critics charge that the agency has paid too little attention to grooming the next generation of controllers responsible for getting planes in and out of airports safely.