Securing Growth and Robust Leadership in American Aviation Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANGWORTHY. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

In 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in Clarence, New York, a community in my district in western New York, killing 49 passengers and 1 person on the ground.

As a congressional staffer at the time, I was there on the ground at the crash site. I saw firsthand the sights and the sounds and the grief of the victims' families as they grappled with the reality that their loved ones were gone. The crash was ruled a result of pilot error.

A year later, those families successfully fought to implement a set of enhanced safety standards, including requiring pilots to obtain 1,500 hours of training. The results are indisputable. Since its enactment, domestic airline fatalities have dropped 99.8 percent. Simply put, they are working, and our skies are the safest they have ever been.

My amendment protects the integrity of the 1,500-hour flight training requirement in the face of efforts to lower pilot training standards and jeopardize the safety of passengers and crew alike.

As Captain Sully Sullenberger, the miracle on the Hudson pilot, has said, while simulators have their place for experienced pilots, they are not a replacement for in-the-sky training, and this requirement must be protected.

Our job as elected leaders is to protect public safety and to help ensure that no other family suffers the heartbreak of losing a loved one to an avoidable air tragedy.

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Mr. LANGWORTHY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bergman), one of only two commercial airline pilots in Congress with more than 20,000 flight hours.

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Mr. LANGWORTHY. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Higgins), my friend and colleague.

Mr. HIGGINS of New York. Mr. Chairman, as the Congressman has said, prior to the crash in February 2009, we were of the belief that if the plane said Continental, it was operated by the national carrier. It wasn't true. It was operated by a regional carrier, and there were two levels of safety, the larger carrier's 1,500 hours for pilots, and the regional carrier's, in the case of this flight, 750 hours.

The National Transportation Safety Board did a thorough investigation of the crash site and the circumstances surrounding it and made an unequivocal conclusion that it was pilot error. The plane went into an aerodynamic stall. The pilot did exactly the opposite of what they should have done.

The plane pitched. It descended. As Mr. Langworthy has said, 49 people died, including 1 individual on the ground.

Since that change was made, commercial aviation fatalities decreased by nearly 100 percent. We ask that the 1,500-hour pilot training rule be sustained in the FAA reauthorization.

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Mr. LANGWORTHY. Mr. Chair, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Tenney).

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Mr. LANGWORTHY. Mr. Chair, we put our lives in the hands of our airline pilots, and we should apply the same standard of safety and training that Americans have come to trust and to expect.

I strongly urge my colleagues to support this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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