The underlying technology is hardly revolutionary-it's been commercially available for years. Mr Buchbach's setup wouldn't impress a video-game enthusiast or a wireless road warrior. But it dazzles US air-safety regulators. The Federal Aviation Administration's technology for routing jumbo jets across open ocean-beyond the reach of radar-hasn't changed much since the 1970s.

US air-traffic controllers in Oakland, California, who each monitor about 15 trans-Pacific flights at a time, still use strips of paper to track planes across their assigned expanse of ocean. They plot each flight's progress on a sheet of plexiglass as the pilot radios in from checkpoints along the way. To predict an aircraft's future position, they use circular slide rules, just as their predecessors did decades ago in the days of the Pan Am Clippers.

The FAA was supposed to have updated the woefully inefficient system long ago. But the agency pulled the plug on its overhaul in the late 1990s after three years of cost overruns and repeated technical failures. Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand forged ahead, developing sophisticated oceanic flight-control systems that have improved safety while reducing flying times, jet-fuel consumption and route congestion over the Pacific.

Now, chastened by failure and scrambling to catch up, the FAA has altered its course, opting to buy into a proven success. Earlier this year, the agency picked two finalists to compete for the job of modernising its Pacific coverage. One, led by closely held Arinc Inc., an Annapolis Maryland, satellite-communications company, is championing Australia's technology. The other, led by Lockheed Martin Corp., is backing New Zealand's.

That the FAA is looking outside the US for help is a testament to how badly the agency has botched its own systemwide efforts to keep pace with the growing demand for air travel, which is expected to double over the next decade. The all-too-familiar result: gridlock in the skies. Over the past two summers, the number of delayed flights at US airports has soared 53%, and the FAA has been powerless to turn the tide. Not only do the mounting delays anger travellers, they irk domestic and foreign airlines alike.

"It's the US that has dragged the chain," says Capt. Murray Warfield, head of regulatory affairs for Australia's Qantas Airways. Qantas and other trans-Pacific carriers say the FM's obsolete over-ocean tracking tools cost them time and money and leave too much room for error.

Several Pacific island nations share those concerns, according to Capt. Warfield and others who attended an international conference on oceanic airspace last year. Delegates from those nations, whom the conference attendees declined to identify, suggested to international aviation authorities that the US should give up control of some of its Pacific airspace, at least until the FAA upgrades its system.

For the FM, modernisation has been a long, slow struggle across the board. In 1981 the agency launched what was to have been a 10-year, US$12 billion programme aimed at improving its management of domestic air traffic. But the programme tripled in cost, and some of its biggest projects were plagued by technical setbacks. As a result, the FAA had to postpone, at least until 2002, the deployment of a key satellite-based navigation system that was supposed to be in place by 1998. The FAA's parallel programme to improve air-traffic control over the Pacific Ocean-where the US administers a total of 48.6 million square kilometres of airspace -was even less successful. In 1995, the FM awarded a US$140 million contract to Hughes Aircraft Co., which has since been acquired by Raytheon Co., for a new oceanic tracking system. The cost of the first phase of the programme, budgeted at US$4.5 million, skyrocketed. One problem: The FM kept altering its goals and specifications.

In 1998, the FM cancelled the rest of thecontract after investing a total of US$58 million in the effort. The programme's failure infuriated the airlines, which had spent more than US$1 million per plane to upgrade their cockpits to handle the new satellite-based technology.

The FAA concedes it has mismanaged of its past modernisation efforts. And it says it has since adopted a more targeted approach to procuring technology, tackling smaller projects one at a time to increase its chances of success.

How did Australia and New Zealand manage to succeed where the US fell short? The answer lies in the small size and relative autonomy of air-safety regulators Airservices Australia and Airways New Zealand, which both operate as self-supporting businesses, earning their income from fees charged to airlines. Their controllers and software developers were intimately involved in the design process, handling much of the work themselves. And they and their managers kept a sharp eye on the bottom line, insisting on simple, no-frills solutions.