NEWARK, N.J. — Airline safety advocates filed a lawsuit Tuesday to force the U.S. Department of Transportation to adopt long-standing safety recommendations in the wake of a deadly plane crash in New York earlier this month.
The complaint, brought by Gail Dunham, executive director of the National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation, was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and names Department of Transportation Secretary Ray H. LaHood and Lynne A. Osmus, acting administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Dunham's group says the government is moving too slowly on improving air safety.
The lawsuit seeks to force the government to approve safety measures recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board as far back as the mid-1990s.
The suit accuses the DOT and FAA of continuing to "shirk their duties to the traveling public" by not doing so.
The DOT oversees the FAA, which has the power to put new safety measures in place. The NTSB is an independent investigative body.
Listed in the lawsuit are recommendations made in 1996 that focus on aircraft performance in icing conditions, spurred by the 1994 crash of an American Eagle flight in Roselawn, Ind., that killed 68 people.
Icing has been cited by NTSB investigators as a factor in the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 — a twin turboprop similar to the American Eagle plane — in Clarence, N.Y., on Feb. 12, in which all 49 people on board and one person on the ground were killed. The investigation is expected to take a year or more to determine the cause of the crash.
Dunham was traveling and unavailable Tuesday, but representatives of the group provided details of the lawsuit at a news conference near Newark Liberty International Airport, where Flight 3407 originated.
"We know from experience that holding government accountable and putting the light of sunshine of public disclosure on these pending measures is perhaps the best — and in some cases the only — way to get the necessary changes that we need," said attorney and former DOT Inspector General Mary Schiavo, a frequent critic of the FAA who is representing Dunham.
Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the FAA, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Brown noted that the agency has issued more than 100 safety directives since 1994 requiring specific actions related to icing for existing aircraft.
The NTSB blamed the 1994 American Eagle crash partly on ice accumulated on the plane's wings, and recommended in 1996 that testing requirements for flight certification of all turboprop planes be adjusted to include the specific kind of icing conditions in the Roselawn crash.
The board also recommended that turboprop planes already in use when the testing requirements were in place should be retested and, if necessary, redesigned. But more than 12 years later, those recommendations remain on a "most wanted list" kept by the NTSB of issues it says the FAA has dragged its feet on.
Since the American Eagle crash, the NTSB has partly blamed the FAA's inaction on icing issues for the crash of a turboprop operated by Comair in Monroe, Mich., in 1997 that killed 29 people and a 2005 crash of a Cessna Citation business jet in Pueblo, Colo., in which eight people died.
"We don't know what caused the crash of Continental Connection 3407, but certainly we can say that the NTSB has been recommending that they pass these lessons learned on to operators as they go along," said Don McCune Jr., a retired airline pilot and attorney for a South Carolina-based aviation law firm.
Dunham's lawsuit also seeks to force the FAA to take action on runway safety recommendations that the NTSB has made, such as installing "moving map" displays in all cockpits to alert pilots if another plane is attempting a takeoff from the wrong runway.
The FAA has undertaken several initiatives in recent years to boost runway safety, but a General Accounting Office report last fall rated the risk of runway collisions "still high."