WASHINGTON — Now that the Families of Continental Flight 3407 have won their battle for Congress to pass landmark aviation safety legislation, they’re going to continue their fight.

Given the families’ history with the agency—and their knowledge of its history—they know they’ll have to press the Federal Aviation Administration to make the most of the new aviation safety measures.

“We have maybe an even greater challenge ahead of us,” said Kathy Johnston, who lost her husband, Kevin, in the February 2009 plane crash that claimed 50 lives in Clarence. “And that’s keeping the FAA on top of this.”

The law Congress passed last week boosts the minimum number of flight hours for beginning passenger airline pilots from 250 to 1,500.

But it also gives all sorts of marching orders to the FAA to improve aviation safety in multiple ways.

The agency will have to set up a pi-lot records database so that airlines will know if a pilot candidate failed multiple flight tests—which is what happened with the pilot of Flight 3407, even though the operator of Flight 3407, Colgan Air, didn’t know it when hiring him.

The FAA will have to draw up new rules on pilot qualifications, while imposing new rules guiding pilot training programs. More specifically, the FAA will have to come up with a way to require simulator-based stall-recovery training for pilots — something the crew of Flight 3407 did not have.

And the FAA also will have to get going on stronger regulations aimed at cracking down on pilot fatigue and establishing pilot mentoring and professional development programs.

The law sets deadlines for each of those actions, and many of them overlap, noted Kevin Kuwik, who lost his girlfriend, Lorin Maurer, in the crash.

Kuwik expressed concern about whether the FAA would do all its new assigned work in a timely fashion. After all, its current efforts to improve pilot training and fatigue rules have met with delay after delay.

That’s why the families are vowing to keep pressing the agency — a move that lawmakers support.

The families should try to schedule a quarterly or twice-a-year meeting with FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, said Sen. Byron Dorgan, the North Dakota Democrat who is chairman of the Aviation Subcommittee.

Dorgan vowed to continue pursuing aviation safety issues, as did Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N. Y.

“There is another job to do, and that is to make sure that the regulations hew to the legislation, that they get done thoroughly and quickly,” Schumer said. “I will be watching this like a hawk.”

Meanwhile, Dorgan stressed that the legislation does not address each and every issue raised by the Colgan crash.

While it mandates that the FAA draw up new rules governing how much and when pilots can fly, the new law does not specifically deal with the fact that many pilots commute long distances to their jobs, Dorgan noted.

That’s important because neither the pilot nor the co-pilot of Flight 3407 had a full night of bed rest the night before the crash. In fact, the co-pilot spent the night commuting from her home in Seattle to her work base in Newark.

“We need to deal with commuting,” said Dorgan, adding that he plans on holding another hearing to address the issue.

Dorgan also said the families may want to consider pursuing an issue he raised at a previous hearing: the fact that right now, main-line carriers like Continental Airlines are not legally liable for the actions of subcontractors like Colgan that fly under the big airline’s name.

When a big airline is not responsible for the actions of its low-cost contractors, Dorgan said, “you’re inevitably going to run into problems.”

Most immediately, though, the families said they will keep an eye on the FAA, an agency that’s long been criticized for its unresponsiveness to safety recommendations.

Under the new law, the agency will have to report annually on its response to National Transportation Safety Board recommendations — responses that have previously lagged for years.

And now the families will be watching to make sure the agency doesn’t lag in response to the new law’s many safety mandates.

“I think that as hard as the last 15 months have been in working with Congress, the actual implementation of this law is truly the key,” Kuwik said. “We’ll really look to the FAA to take the bull by the horns.”

jzremski@buffnews.comnull