Is it time, he asked, to regulate airlines again?

Mr. Casey's contacts with Deputy Treasury Secretary John E. Robson began during the airline deregulation debates of the 1970's, when Mr. Casey headed American Airlines and Mr. Robson was at the Civil Aeronautics Board, the disbanded agency that once regulated airlines.

The Wall Street Journal says that, in its final report on a 1997 Korean Airlines crash in Guam (released yesterday), the NTSB lambasted the Federal Aviation Administration for not regulating foreign airlines enough.

The agency, an investigative arm of Congress, solicited an opinion from the Transportation Department, which regulates airlines.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates airlines, repeated last week that USAir's operations were safe and that the airline met all industry safety and training standards.

In many of those countries, there is no law giving the civilian agency the authority to regulate airlines, or the agency lacks the resources to do so.

Two years after the Civil Aeronautics Board, the Federal agency that had regulated airlines since 1938, was disbanded in December 1984, more people are traveling by air, and more airlines are merging in a more competitive, deregulated market.

Threaten to Competition Seen In letters to the associations, officials of Federal regulatory agencies argued that restrictions on price advertising could dampen competition and that only the Federal Government could regulate airlines.

The safety board works with the F.A.A., which regulates airlines and runs the air traffic system, but the board's final reports often cite F.A.A. shortcomings.

But this year's accidents have turned a spotlight on the agency's tardiness in implementing safety measures that could make air travel safer and on the tension that exists in the F.A.A.'s dual mission of regulating airlines and promoting them.