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Go ahead. Ask a plane full of commercial airline passengers how many like to fly. How many hands do you see waving overhead?

These days, it's apt to be a big round number, and that number is zero.

Nothing, many airline passengers say, is as abhorrent about travel these days as flying. Ask passengers whose luggage has been mishandled; there are more of them. Ask passengers whose flights continually land way behind schedule; there are scores of them too.

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In fact, ask just about any passenger, and you'll hear tales of woe so pitiful that a recent survey showed the airlines are more despised than the Internal Revenue Service.

Can it get much worse than that? Yes. And it's just about to.

Welcome to the summer of our discontent — when an increasingly surly public meets an incredibly stressed system. Fasten your seat belts, friends. Bumpy doesn't begin to describe it.

Perhaps nothing epitomizes the state of traveler anger over air travel as much as the case of Bella Miller.

Bella is a terrier-Lab-mix puppy. Or she was in January 2005, about the same time as ire toward airlines was steadily growing. Bella was supposed to fly from Chicago to Jacksonville, Fla., on the same flight as her owner, Kristen Miller. The flight landed, but no puppy was delivered to baggage claim.

The only employee Miller could scare up in the nearly deserted Jacksonville airport was largely indifferent, Miller said. She was furious that her dog was missing but she was almost as mad at how her problem was handled. Miller was so irate, she said, that the employee threatened to call security.

Bella, missing in action for the next 20 hours, finally turned up in Jacksonville "starving, terrified," Miller said. "She smelled atrocious, and she was stiff for days."

Which is exactly how many of us humans feel after a flight. Consider these statistics:

Airplanes are flying fuller than ever — about 80%. That means if you miss a connection, you're more likely to be stranded because there is no flexibility to reschedule.

More baggage is mishandled. In March, for every 1,000 passengers, almost eight filed mishandled baggage reports. Last year, that number was fewer than six (Department of Transportation statistics).

Flights are late. In 2002, 82% of flights made it within 15 minutes of published schedules, which is considered on time. In 2006, 75% arrived within that window. For the first three months of 2007, that number was down to 71% (Bureau of Transportation).

People are mad about all of the above. The number of consumer complaints to the DOT nearly doubled in March of this year from March of last.

In February's Iconoculture, a publication that charts consumer trends, Kate Muhl, a consumer strategist who covers transportation, travel and leisure, writes: "It sucks to fly. Seriously, the horrors of air travel might now be the one unifying American experience."

So color today's travelers cranky. But do the airlines really have us in a headlock or is our pain self-inflicted? History suggests it may be both.

Still cheap to fly

The angst of airline travel has its roots in deregulation, which was designed to increase competition and decrease ticket prices. The marketplace would regulate air travel, and consumers would be the big winners.

The airfare free-for-all in the last three decades suggests that consumers have benefited — fiscally, anyway. The average domestic airfare in 1995, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, was $359, which equals $484 in today's inflation-adjusted dollars. Those same bureau statistics show that last year we paid only $380 for the identical ticket.

This makes no sense, especially when you consider that in 1995 a gallon of West Coast gas cost $1.22, but it certainly has allowed more of us to learn how to fasten a seat belt.

And so flying, once considered the province of the rich and powerful, has essentially become public transportation. Goodbye, glamour; hello, flying Greyhounds.

By 2000, more people than ever were flying, but they also were complaining more. Congress considered a passenger bill of rights but abandoned it after airlines promised they would play nice.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, a disaster that sent airlines scrambling to fill seats. The carriers got a break from our badmouthing.