The American airline industry puddle-jumps from crisis to crisis. The airlines make a little money when the nation is prosperous, but even slight turbulence in the economy sends the industry into a financial tailspin. The pattern has been repeated time and again over the past 30 years.

Buckle your seat belts.

Major U.S. airlines could report a $1.4 billion loss for the first three months of this year, according to an analysis by Merrill Lynch. Flight delays are setting records as passengers stew in the terminals, and the big carriers are on the brink of merger mania.

Passengers continue to be an afterthought. Fares are going up, and customer service is going down. Last year, one in four flights was late, leaving 163 million passengers cooling their heels.

Airlines point to the weather, but an analysis by USA Today concluded that airline mistakes — such as pilot shortages and mechanical breakdowns — cause about as many delays as Mother Nature.

And then there’s the airlines’ practice of scheduling too many flights at the same time, regardless of an airport’s ability to handle the traffic. At Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, airlines have scheduled 45 flights to depart within 15 minutes of each other. That’s twice the airport’s capacity, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Largely as a result, 6 million passengers spent between one and five hours sitting in planes on runways last year. The government could do a lot to reduce that problem by rationing take-off slots during rush hours. Instead, the FAA has allowed airline schedules to become works of fiction.

Last month, we learned that some airlines’ maintenance staffs were treating FAA safety directives as mere suggestions, while FAA supervisors looked the other way — over the concerns and objections of front-line inspectors. As a result, Southwest Airlines flew planes with cracks in their hulls.

When the FAA finally got tough this month, it produced chaos in the terminals.  American canceled more than 3,000 flights after the FAA discovered that wire bundles were improperly secured on its MD-80 jets.

The industry went through its last financial crisis following the 2001 recession and terrorist attacks. Major airlines went bankrupt, passenger service suffered and the industry lost $35 billion. The slump lasted four years.

After a brief flirtation with profitability, the industry now finds itself struggling with rising fuel prices and an incipient recession. Fuel prices are up 74 percent over the last year. Five small airlines have gone broke since December.

Airline stockholders — who never seem to learn — are taking yet another drubbing. Investors in American Airlines, the biggest carrier at Lambert field, saw the price of company stock fall by 75 percent over the past year. On Wednesday, American reported that it lost $328 million in the first quarter of 2008.

At the moment, some airlines see mergers as possible salvation. Northwest and Delta this week agreed to wed, a move that would create the nation’s biggest airline. Continental on Tuesday all but hung out a “for sale” sign, and it has held talks with United. That could prompt American, now the nation’s biggest, to seek its own partner or try to break up one of the other deals.

There’s little overlap between Northwest and Delta’s routes, so consumers should feel little effect. Both are small players at Lambert Field. But a wholesale industry consolidation would be another matter.

“We very well may end up with three mega-airlines in the U.S., and bigger is not better,” said Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville, who chairs the House Aviation Subcommittee. “Generally speaking, mergers are good for airline executives, not so good for consumers and employees.”

Passengers could find themselves with fewer choices and higher prices, and with fewer competitors, airlines would have even less incentive to improve service.

Any mergers would need the approval of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division. Travelers should hope the Justice Department’s regulators are paying more attention to their duties than the FAA’s were to theirs.