It just wasn't right. A good man shouldn't lose the daughter he loves in a plane crash that shouldn't have happened and then write 40 members of Congress seeking answers but get not one reply. Not one.

That's how Kevin Kuwik saw things a few weeks after Scott Maurer's daughter, the love of Kuwik's life, died in the February 2009 crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Clarence.

It gnawed at Kuwik, this thing about Maurer asking Congress to listen and Congress not listening at all.

So Kuwik did just what you might expect of someone raised in the don't-take-no-for-an-answer world of Erie County politics. He went to work.

His father, Ed, who had been an Erie County legislator and Lackawanna mayor, put his son in touch with several members of Congress and retired pols.

And they filled Kuwik's mind with advice he put to use when he sat down at his laptop in the early hours of an April Monday two months after the crash.

"This is Kevin Kuwik, and I am Lorin Maurer's boyfriend," he wrote to the families of the 50 people who died when Flight 3407 tumbled to the ground.

"I know we are all dealing with a number of emotions and challenges as we try to find a way to cope with this terrible tragedy. I also know it often seems that our voice doesn't matter when it comes to our government; that it is a futile uphill battle to attempt to do anything.

"But somehow in the honor of Lorin and all our loved ones on that flight, I want to feel that I am doing something positive."

Noting that he was working with Maurer, Kuwik then said something politicians say all the time, to far lesser effect.

"We have a plan," Kuwik wrote.

That plan didn't say anything about outmaneuvering the lobbyists and lawmakers to enact what Rep. Jerry F. Costello, the Illinois Democrat who heads the Aviation Subcommittee, called "the strongest aviation safety legislation in decades."

It didn't mention winning a citizens' lobbying victory, the likes of which Costello and other lawmakers said they've never seen.

Kuwik simply suggested that the families reach out to their congressmen and gather in Washington in May, when the National Transportation Safety Board would discuss the crash.

When the families got to Washington, though, they realized

Kuwik -- a former Army captain and then assistant men's basketball coach at Butler University -- had planned for battle.

Through a lobbyist who was dating a friend, he had set up meetings for the families on Capitol Hill, much like any interest group would.

"You've got to play the game the way they want it to be played," Kuwik said.

Hard-headed as that may sound, Kuwik was acting out of love. After a year of dating and a lifetime of putting careers first, Kuwik and Lorin Maurer talked of spending the rest of their lives together. Her death, by all accounts, both crushed him and motivated him. Within weeks of the crash, Kuwik had focused on flight safety with the obsessive dedication and penchant for planning he'd previously shown fighting in Iraq and working his way up the ranks in college basketball.

With the aid of Maurer, Susan Bourque and Karen Eckert -- sisters who had lost their sister, 9/11 activist Beverly Eckert, in the crash -- he pulled together a stash of information about regional airlines like Colgan Air, the Continental subcontractor that operated Flight 3407.

And he prepared the families to talk to lawmakers not only from the heart, but from the head, about how the Federal Aviation Administration had been ignoring safety recommendations.

"It was as if Capt. Kuwik had everything planned," said Kenneth Mellett of McLean, Va., who lost his son, Coleman, in the crash. "Everyone knew what they were going to do."

Which was to win Congress to the side of aviation safety.

Amid revelations that the captain of Flight 3407 had failed flight tests and failed to pay attention as the plane came close to stalling, several family members met with Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand, D-N.Y.

"We came up with a strategy," said Gillibrand, whom family members credit with turning their focus to getting safety changes implemented in an FAA reauthorization bill.

And on the last day of the hearings, the families met with Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who somberly shared that he had lost his 23-year-old daughter after surgery.

His eyes welling with tears, Dorgan -- chairman of Senate Aviation Subcommittee -- vowed to do something about the regional airlines and the FAA's oversight of them.

"We're going after them," he told the families. "This is unacceptable."

A marketer's sales pitch

It looked easy at first. Aides on both sides of Capitol Hill drew up safety legislation and talked a good game. Kuwik and Maurer -- most frequently accompanied by Bourque and Eckert, who had quit their government jobs to lobby for safety -- attended hearing after hearing to push the bill along.

Kuwik took to working his BlackBerry till the charge went out, pressing congressional aides for help and pressing his fellow citizen lobbyists to join him in Washington. Family members recall getting e-mails from him at midnight, at 2 a.m., at 5 a.m.; they still wonder if he ever slept.

Maurer, a tall, lean marketing pro from South Carolina, would begin his sales pitch for aviation safety by casually mentioning he had been living on "the dark side" since Lorin's death. Selling aviation safety like a product he believed in, Maurer was the "heavy," pressing the staffers or lawmakers who most needed to be pressed.

Strikingly blonde and strikingly smart, and armed with years of government know-how, Bourque and Eckert helped model the Flight 3407 effort after their late sister's push for homeland security measures after 9/11.

Wearing pictures on lanyards around their necks, they reminded lawmakers that "Beverly would be raising hell" if one of them had died in the horrible way that she died.

Other 3407 family members, such as John Kausner, a construction executive from Clarence, often joined them.

Kausner started his presentations by saying "I lost my baby girl," his daughter Ellyce, in the crash. From there, he described the shoddy training the Flight 3407 pilots received, saying such a thing wouldn't be tolerated in the construction industry.

Meanwhile, Maurer enlisted a hero to the cause: Jeffrey Skiles, a pilot union official who was the first officer on the USAirways jet that crash-landed on the Hudson River a month before the Colgan Air crash.

"They had a powerful, sophisticated lobbying effort," Skiles said later.

With Skiles' support, the families won what seemed to be a big victory last October, when aviation safety legislation passed the House by 398 votes.

Most importantly, the bill boosted the minimum number of flight hours for starting pilots to 1,500 -- up from 250 today and far more than what Flight 3407's pilots had when Colgan hired them.

Airlines and flight schools hated that provision because it would cost them money -- and in December, the families learned that Randy Babbitt, the top administrator at FAA, would side with the aviation industry.

Kuwik begged the families to confront Babbitt at a December Senate hearing. And thanks to Margie Brandquist of Leesburg, Va., who lost her sister Mary "Belle" Pettys, of West Seneca, they upstaged the nation's top aviation regulator.

At Brandquist's request, 35 members of the families group came to D.C. clad in red, "the color of the heart," which became the families' trademark.

Babbitt took the airlines' side, blandly defending a lower experience threshold for pilots. But as he spoke, lawmakers, lobbyists and photographers couldn't help but focus on the families, who sat glumly in their Christmas colors, staring at the back of Babbitt's head.

Turning up the heat

And at a news conference afterwards, they trampled on Babbitt's message.

"Once again," Maurer said, "it looks like corporate lobbying dollars are going to win out over the average citizens."

Despite all the families' efforts, Maurer was right.

Kuwik knew it as he stood at a podium at a Washington news conference in March.

Sleepless and exhausted from lobbying and living through two kinds of March madness -- he was now an assistant coach at Ohio State -- Kuwik broke from form and broke down in tears.

"We've done everything we're supposed to do since last May," he said, his voice cracking with emotion. "We've had the meetings. We've sent the e-mails. We can't do anything else."

With that, the families started turning up the heat on the lawmakers who tried to burn them.

First, though, Kuwik had to swallow hard and accommodate one of those lawmakers.

Dorgan, so supportive months earlier, decided he couldn't back a big boost in minimum flight hours for pilots: The University of North Dakota flight school in his home state wouldn't stand for it.

So Sen. Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who had pushed Senate leadership to bring the bill to the floor, presented the families with a dilemma: They could accept a lower threshold for flight hours, or lose.

The issue divided the families' leadership, with Maurer and Skiles holding firm and the Eckert sisters willing to compromise.

Kuwik made the call for the group as they walked to a meeting in the office of Sen. Bob Corker. The families would settle for an 800-hour experience threshold for new pilots.

Without even time to think about the decision, the families had to get tough again.

Corker was holding up the FAA bill, and an aide to the Tennessee Republican told the group that the House version of the larger FAA bill would "devastate" Memphis-based FedEx because it would make its drivers easier to unionize.

Hearing that, Maurer exploded.

"Would your senator like to have a Buffalo-like accident in his state because he blocked the bill?" Maurer asked.

Then Jennifer West of Clarence, who lost her husband, Ernie, in the crash, let loose.

"Don't talk to me about devastated," she said. "We are devastated."

With that, West slammed a photo of her daughter on a table and said: "I want you to look in her eyes and tell her that her daddy died in vain."

The Corker aide, clearly shaken, then left the room, and the families, clearly distraught, left.

But minutes later, the Corker aide shuffled them back into the office -- and told them Corker had lifted his hold.

A winning gambit

The Senate passed the FAA bill by a measure of 93 to 0 a few days later, but that action only opened the door to months of agony for the families.

The chief negotiators trying to settle the House-Senate differences on the FAA bill, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Rep. James L. Oberstar of Minnesota, were barely talking. And nothing was happening.

So Kuwik decided the families should treat Rockefeller and Oberstar the way he treats potential Ohio State basketball recruits. Just as Kuwik "shows them love" by appearing at their games, the families would show up in West Virginia and Minnesota to deliver their message.

They went in the slow-news week after the Fourth of July, and the gambit paid off big.

In West Virginia, the 3407 lobbying trip resulted in stories by two newspapers, the Associated Press, three television stations, NPR and the state's most popular radio talk show.

In Minnesota, the visit made front-page news in Duluth and Hibbing. TV viewers saw Eckert reading a letter Oberstar wrote lamenting problems with regional airlines that surfaced in a 1993 crash in Hibbing -- problems that reappeared 16 years later in the Colgan crash.

"We're not making noise, we're trying to get change," Eckert said in Duluth.

Returning to Washington the next week, the families noticed a new urgency on Capitol Hill. And a congressional aide privately explained why.

Lawmakers "want the Colgan families off their backs," the aide said.

Proof of that came on July 20, when Rockefeller, the powerful but aloof Democrat from the Mountain State, ushered the families into his office for the first time.

Rockefeller delivered shocking and very good news: The Senate would agree to the House's proposal to require new pilots to have 1,500 hours of experience, up from the 800 that Dorgan settled for in March.

"The families won them over -- Dorgan, Rockefeller and everybody else," said Schumer, the group's legislative mentor for more than a year, who pushed aside several of his own aviation priorities to focus exclusively on helping the families.

Still, another extraneous issue -- long-haul flights at Ronald Reagan National Airport in D.C. -- remained unresolved, and the families feared the stalemate could doom their efforts.

On the other side of the Hill, the families kept pressing Oberstar.

The loquacious, union-loving Democrat from Minnesota, who chaired the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, was considering a temporary extension of FAA funding yet again.

That would have pushed the safety debate into the fall. In response, Kathy Johnston, a school nurse from East Amherst who lost her husband, Kevin, in the crash, stared Oberstar dead in the eye.

"We cannot live through another extension," she told him.

They soon learned they wouldn't have to.

Schumer pressed Oberstar to attach the safety provisions to a must-pass FAA funding extension, and told the families it was the best deal they could get.

What's more, it was almost exactly what they had wanted: a strong bill that toughens pilot training, establishes a database so that pilots will no longer be able to hide flight test failures and clarifies which airline company is flying your airplane.

Making a difference

In a meeting with Oberstar on July 28, the families officially learned they had won, and that was the beginning of a thrill ride that would not end for them until President Obama signed the bill a week ago today.

The emotions crested, though, as midnight approached on the night of July 29, as the House neared its vote on the measure.

Gathered in the hallways of the Capitol, the citizen lobbyists said they couldn't believe it. After more than 30 trips to Washington and meetings with about 90 senators or their staffs, they had proven that "one person can make a difference," said Costello, the Illinois lawmaker and aviation expert.

One family member after another lauded Kuwik, saying their story was his story.

"He had a plan. We couldn't have done it without him," said Sue Pash of Stafford, Va., another sister of Pettys.

"I wasn't into politics; I didn't think I could do anything like this," said Justine Krasuski, a retired insurance agent from Cheektowaga whose husband, Jerome, died in the crash.

"We've shown we can change the world. It's remarkable. I have a whole new outlook."

Soon, the families gathered in the gallery above the House floor and listened as lawmakers took turns praising them.

"They have really turned the tears of sadness into tears of joy," said Rep. Chris Lee, R-Clarence, who has served as a key cheerleader and support system for the group from the start.

"I really don't think anybody else -- any group of families -- could have done what this group has done tonight."

With those words, the men and women in red in the gallery, one by one, started to weep.

That was just the start of it. After the House passed the bill by voice vote, Costello, Lee and other key lawmakers joined the families to share hugs and tears.

And off to the side, where it might be hard to notice, Terry Maurer, Lorin's mother, hugged Kuwik hard, like a mother would hug a son.

Whispering into his ear, she said: "She's proud of you."

 jzremski@buffnews.com null