WASHINGTON — For three days, Lyn Morris sat and listened to witnesses talking about how her daughter’s low pay and lack of rest might have contributed to the plane crash that ended her life and 49 others.

After the painful listening finally ended, Morris sat down and quietly explained that in her view, none of that was so.

“She was neither fatigued, nor was she sick,” said Morris, the mother of Rebecca L. Shaw, the 24-year-old co-pilot of Continental Connection Flight 3407. “She wasn’t. And she was a really, really good pilot. She was excellent.”

Morris spoke to The Buffalo News on Thursday after three days of National Transportation Safety Board hearings into the causes behind the Feb. 12 crash in Clarence Center.

While witnesses at the hearing cited Shaw’s lack of attention to the instruments as the plane slowed down and her incorrect decision to raise the plane’s flaps, Morris stressed that the full story of Flight 3407 will not be told for many months.

“I don’t feel like I know any more now than I did three months ago,” Morris said. “I don’t think the information is put together.”

What Morris knows is that even though witnesses at the hearing made much of the coast-to-coast red-eye commute that her daughter made on the night before the crash, Shaw was not fatigued when she took the right seat in the cockpit of Flight 3407.

Not only did Shaw sleep on the flight from her Seattle-area home to Newark, N. J., she also slept for 5 1/2 hours once she got to Newark, Morris said.

Besides, “she was 24,” Morris said. “She had tons of energy.”

Morris saw her daughter shortly before she left her home in Seattle and saw no signs that she was sick.

Noting that on the transcript of the voice cockpit recorder, Shaw sneezed once, Morris said: “That’s not a cold.”

In the interview, Morris showed no bitterness toward the witnesses who criticized her daughter’s actions, including those from Colgan Air, the Continental subcontractor that paid Shaw about $16,000 during her first year as a co-pilot.

Shaw decided to make the commute from Seattle after a colleague who was doing the same thing said it was easier than living in a smaller city. That’s because Seattle has good flight connections to the Colgan hub in Newark, where she was based.

Making that commute was better than getting a “crash pad” with other pilots, said Morris, noting there would be little rest for Shaw if she were living in a place where there was “confusion when people came in.”

Shaw and her husband, Troy, moved in with her parents in January until they could find an apartment. Her commute to Newark to catch Flight 3407 was only her second since she moved, her mother said.

Shaw had joined Colgan in January 2008 and saw it as a steppingstone to a major airline. And when she told her mother her salary last summer, Morris was “shocked” — but noted that Shaw herself never complained.

“She loved working for Colgan,” Morris said. “She understood the progression of a professional pilot.”

Colgan officials have been “very caring, very compassionate,” in the wake of the crash, Morris said.

At the hearing, though, Colgan executives offered harsh criticisms of Shaw’s commute and the performance of the pilot, Capt. Marvin D. Renslow.

“I was surprised by the last three days,” Morris said. But she refused to go any further in criticizing Colgan.

“I really don’t want to go there,” she said. “That doesn’t build Becky up. The only thing that I want out there is that my daughter was truly a professional and she was fit to fly and that she was prepared and trained and that she was a good pilot. I’m not accountable for anyone else’s actions.”

Morris said she especially wanted to discuss her daughter with The News for one reason.

“I wanted the people of Buffalo to know that we care. We realize how devastating this had to be on your community. You’ve treated us very graciously, and we would like to thank the community for all their love and care.”

Officials in Buffalo were especially kind when Shaw’s family traveled to the city to retrieve Shaw’s remains, and the compassion continued over the last three days in conversations between Morris and the families of victims of the crash.

“Buffalo must be a very nice community,” she said. “They have very nice people.”

Morris acknowledged that the hearings were painful for her but added that they were no more painful for her than they were for the others in the audience who lost loved ones when that plane tumbled from the sky.

What’s more, the hearings left untold Morris’ story of a loving daughter who loved to fly and who, according to her colleagues, was very good at it. It was Shaw’s dream to fly ever since her senior year of high school, and when she told her mother about it one day over the dinner table, “I’m really proud of myself because I didn’t laugh,” her mother said. “You know, she was just passionate about it from that moment on.”

Indeed, pictures of Shaw in her pilot’s uniform show her smiling radiantly, much as her mother smiles when discussing her late daughter.

“If you talk to pilots who flew with her, they liked to fly with her,” Morris said. “She was good. She did her job well.”

Morris said she thinks Renslow didn’t meet her daughter until the day of the crash, although other Colgan employees knew her well.

A flight attendant at Shaw’s memorial service, for example, came up to Morris and said: “We feel safe when we fly with Becky.”

Now that the world is paying attention to the Flight 3407 tragedy, Morris wants to say something about her daughter that none of the airline executives and government officials who testified at the hearings would have any way of knowing.

“She was absolutely amazing,” her mother said. “She was full of compassion and caring. And she’s hurting for everybody who was on that plane.”