WASHINGTON – Seven hundred or so emails later and with a lot of help from their friends, the families of Continental Flight 3407 this week beat back the biggest threat yet to the aviation safety reforms they forced through Congress after losing their loved ones in a 2009 plane crash in Clarence.
Well, they beat it back for now, at least.
There’s still a proposal in the Senate to cut back on the number of hours that pilots must fly before qualifying to work for passenger airlines, but a proposal to do just that died an unexpected death on the House floor late Wednesday night. Five weeks after the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee unanimously passed a major aviation bill that aimed, in part, to cut back on the so-called “1,500-hour rule,” the House voted to remove that provision from the larger Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization measure.
Led by Rep. Nicholas A. Langworthy, the Buffalo area’s House delegation on Wednesday beat back an effort to alter the flight safety rules Congress passed 13 years ago in response to the 2009 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Clarence.
The vote, on an amendment sponsored by Rep. Nicholas A. Langworthy and other Western New York lawmakers, came as a surprise even to those who most…
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