15 years after Flight 3407 crash, ‘the families’ continue successful aviation safety battle

Such is the status of the disparate set of strangers who pulled together as a lobbying force – and one singular family – after an exhausted, poorly trained pilot and copilot lost control of a Continental Connection plane and crashed it into a home in Clarence Center on Feb. 12, 2009. Fifty people – 49 in the plane and one on the ground – were killed.

Fifteen years later, on Monday, those who lost loved ones that day will mark the anniversary with a ceremony at the Long Street crash site. But they will also mark something even larger: an unprecedented era of aviation safety that they helped create.

Not one American commercial passenger plane has crashed in the 15 years since the Flight 3407 tragedy. Experts say that’s not only because of layer upon layer of safety improvements over the decades, but also because of the measures mandated by law after Congress heeded the families’ wishes and passed landmark aviation safety legislation 18 months after the crash.

Thanks to that law, pilots are required to get better training, more experience and more rest. And airlines get better information about good pilots and bad ones thanks to the creation of a pilot record database.

Regional airlines and their supporters have continued to challenge the law’s provision requiring new pilots to have the equivalent of 1,500 hours of flight experience before flying commercial passengers. But time and again – and as recently as last week – the families and their congressional allies have beaten back challenges to that requirement.

Scott Maurer, one of the leading members of the families group, thinks he knows why.

“The longer we go without another fatal accident, it’s so much harder to say that what was done was wrong and not working,” said Maurer, whose daughter Lorin was killed in the crash. “I mean, it’s clearly working.”