A flight safety company that helped train the pilots of the Colgan Air turboprop plane that crashed in Clarence has been sued for the first time for its alleged role in the February crash that killed 50 people.

FlightSafety International Inc., headquartered at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, was cited in four lawsuits filed last week in New York State Supreme Court for its alleged deficiencies in stall recovery training.

“Real change can occur only if we look at all elements of the tragedy,” said Terrence M. Connors, who filed suit on behalf of Kevin W. Johnston. “Training is key.”

The lawsuits allege that FlightSafety trained Capt. Marvin D. Renslow and First Officer Rebecca Lynn Shaw in flight simulators under contract with Colgan Air.

Renslow, 47, was trained by FlightSafety on its Bombardier Dash 8-Q400 simulator in November 2008 in St. Louis, according to the suit.

Shaw, 24, received her flight simulator training from FlightSafety in March 2008 at the company’s Toronto center, the lawsuits say.

Despite the simulator training, the suits allege, neither pilot received instructions in using what is called the stick pusher in the Colgan aircraft.

Reconstruction of the final seconds of Flight 3407 by the National Transportation Safety Board show that Renslow took the exact opposite approach to the stick pusher and failed to bring the aircraft out of a deadly spin to the ground.

While the NTSB has not yet made a final conclusion on what caused the crash, experts have pointed to a series of factors, including icing, fatigue, idle cockpit chatter between the pilots, allowing the aircraft to slow to a stalling speed, and Renslow’s improper use of the stick pusher.

The slow speed, according to those reconstructions, activated a device called the stick shaker, which should have alerted the pilot to lower the plane’s nose and apply power to bring it out of its aerodynamic stall.

The stick shaker alarm was followed by an alarm for the stick pusher, which would have automatically lowered the plane’s nose. Instead, the reconstruction shows, Renslow jerked the stick upward, which sent Flight 3407 into its fatal spin.

The lawsuits, like the two dozen already filed in U. S. District Court, also cite Colgan Air and its parent company, Pinnacle Airlines Corp., as well as Continental Airlines Inc., whose name the Colgan flight was flying under.

A number of the other suits also named the manufacturer of the aircraft, Bombardier Aerospace.

Two things, however, mark a difference between these last four suits and the two dozen before them: naming FlightSafety as a defendant, and filing them in state court.

“We felt that training was part of this,” said attorney James T. Scime of Lipsitz Green, who filed suit for Justine Krasuski on behalf of Jerome Krasuski of Cheektowaga. “We felt they should answer for their role in this tragedy.” R. Charles Miner of Smith, Miner, O’Shea & Mahoney, who sued for Cheryl Borner on behalf of David M. Borner, also said the four attorneys felt they should file the suit in state court.

“You’d really be hard pressed to find somebody in Erie County who was not touched by this crash,” Miner said. “We just think that Erie County jurors, since they have the most at stake in this, should hear this suit.”

Also filing suit last week was Timothy W. Hoover and Kenneth A. Manning for Tina Siniscalco, the sister of Mary Julia Abraham, who died in the crash. Hoover declined comment.

A spokesman for FlightSafety, citing the Thanksgiving Day holiday, said there was nobody available to comment.

FlightSafety International, like The Buffalo News, is a Berkshire Hathaway Company.