[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[House]
[Page 16455]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           FLIGHT 3407 EMAILS

  (Ms. HOCHUL asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Ms. HOCHUL. On a cold, snowy night in February 2009, the lives of 
hundreds of people in my district were shattered. The cruel irony of 50 
loved ones killed in a plane crash the Friday before Valentine's Day 
weekend is lost on no one in my district, near Buffalo, which is 
exactly where the Colgan Flight 3407 plane crash occurred.
  The families began a quest for answers--hearings on Capitol Hill and 
NTSB investigations. Finally, we thought we had the answers. Yet it 
wasn't until a lawsuit was filed in Federal court in Buffalo and 
through the perseverance of a Buffalo news reporter that they finally 
announced that the company never gave critical emails regarding the 
inability of this pilot to fly this plane. Those emails were never 
revealed until now.
  That's why I teamed up with our local delegation--Congresswoman 
Slaughter, Congressmen Higgins and Reed, and Senators Schumer and 
Gillibrand--to call for a Federal investigation by the United States 
Attorney General into what this company knew and when they knew it. 
Whether they possessed critical emails at the right time, whether they 
gave them to us, whether there were other emails that would shed light 
as to what happened on that night, the families deserve to know; 
western New Yorkers need to know; and America needs to know.

                          ____________________