Flight 3407 Families Renew Fight to Preserve Aviation Safety Measures

Apr. 19—WASHINGTON — Once again and with as much feeling as ever, the Flight 3407 families returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to confront the latest — and perhaps the greatest — threat to the aviation safety law they pushed to passage nearly 13 years ago.

At a House hearing, they looked on with displeasure as the new Republican leader of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee pressed to alter the requirement that copilots have 1,500 hours of experience before flying a passenger airliner. And afterward, the family members gathered with allies old and new for a press conference in front of the Capitol, where they made clear they would fight as hard to preserve that safety law as they did to get it passed.

Rep. Sam Graves, the Missouri Republican leading the charge to trim the so-called 1,500 hour rule, has said Congress reacted with emotion in passing those safety measures.

John Kausner of Clarence, one of the leading members of the Flight 3407 group, acknowledged as much.

"For me, it was emotional. I lost my daughter," said Kausner, whose daughter Ellyce was one of 50 people who died when the exhausted, undertrained pilots of Continental Connection Flight 3407 bumbled through a flight emergency and crashed their plane into a house in Clarence in February 2009.

Gesturing to others who lost loved ones in the crash, Kausner then said: "Yeah, it was emotional. Lost her sister. Lost her husband. Lost her husband. Lost his daughter. Lost her husband. Lost his son. ... So yeah, we were emotional, believe it. But we weren't irrational. We got a law passed. It was good and it has worked ever since."

Both the family members and their allies credited that law, which also boosted pilot training and rest requirements, for the fact that not one U.S. passenger airline has suffered a crash with mass fatalities since those safety measures went into effect.

In the previous 20 years, 1,186 people died in such crashes.

"There's a wonderful old saying that if it's not broken, don't fix it," said Rep. Nick Langworthy, a Republican who represents Clarence as well as much of rural Erie County and the Southern Tier. "It's a reasonable question to ask: Why would we play games with altering a safety protocol that is clearly effective?"

Republicans and Democrats who represent Western New York in Congress have long backed the Flight 3407 families in their fight for aviation safety, but family members said they were unsure until recently if Langworthy, a first-year lawmaker, would prove as interested in the issue. His impassioned support for the safety measures this week pleased both the family members and his Democratic colleague from Buffalo, Rep. Brian Higgins.

"Obviously, in Congressman Nick Langworthy, we have a strong, strident voice who will continue the effort we started nearly 15 years ago," Higgins said.

Aviation experts including Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger have long attributed the 99.8% drop in U.S. commercial aviation fatalities to the flight safety law passed in the wake of the Flight 3407 crash, but the 1,500-hour provision has been its most controversial provision from the start.

Regional airlines have long pushed for modifications to the requirement, but this year they won a top ally as Graves, himself a general aviation pilot, became chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

At the Aviation Subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Graves noted that all of the pilots in the crashes in the decade before Flight 3407 had more than 1,500 hours of experience. So did the Flight 3407 pilots, who exhibited, in Graves' words, "a severe lack of professionalism" in crashing the plane.

And at a full committee hearing earlier in the week, Graves pushed for amending the 1,500-hour rule to allow some of that time to be spent not in the sky, but in a simulator.

"You can simulate any situation, any problem, any mechanical failure," he said. "You can't do that in in real life. And saying that a pilot has to have 1,500 hours, which means they're gonna go out and rent a Cessna and just circle in the sky, is not the kind of training that we need for our airline pilots."

During Wednesday's hearing, the president and CEO of the Regional Airline Association, Faye Malarkey Black, agreed.

"The same studies that they used to craft the rule have been updated four times, and each shows that pilots now build time at the expense of the quality and the recency of their training," Black said.

The regional airlines have long argued that the 1,500-hour rule is contributing to a pilot shortage by making it too arduous and too expensive to become a commercial airline pilot.

Rep. Garret Graves, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Aviation Subcommittee, said the pilot shortage is only likely to get worse in the coming years.

He noted that the Federal Aviation Administration projects a 16% increase in the number of pilots in the next 20 years — a time when passenger volume is expected to nearly double.

"We've got a problem moving forward," he said.

Altering the 1,500 rule was just one of many alternatives lawmakers raised Wednesday for boosting the number of pilots. Other alternatives included increasing grants and loans for those learning to fly, promoting the industry in underrepresented minority communities and boosting the pilot retirement age from 65 to 67.

Such alternatives will be considered this year as Congress hammers out must-pass legislation reauthorizing the FAA.

In the House, Langworthy said he will press Republicans from New York and elsewhere to oppose changes to the 1,500-hour rule. And in the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat and a longtime leader in the Flight 3407 families' fight for aviation safety, has long said he will block any such changes.

Meanwhile, the families said they will keep on fighting.

"We will continue to honor the memory of our loved ones who were lost that night by showing up and by resisting any attempts to weaken the safety initiatives that were unanimously adopted by Congress and implemented after the crash," said Scott Maurer, who lost his daughter Lorin in the crash.

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