Fifteen years after they lost their loved ones, the Families of Continental Flight 3407 gathered in the dusk at the memorial at the site of the crash for a scene that was, at once, both eerie and celebratory.
Planes flying to and from Buffalo Niagara International Airport roared overhead. Sirens sounded for some other, much smaller emergency, and an ambulance passed behind the memorial with lights flashing.
Fifteen years later, those who lost loved ones in the Flight 3407 tragedy in Clarence will mark the anniversary with a ceremony at the Long Street crash site. But they will also mark something even larger: an unprecedented era of aviation safety that they helped create.
Yet the families and their allies ignored it all, knowing that they had done their part to keep the people in those planes safe.
“You folks changed aviation history,” John Kausner, who lost his daughter Ellyce in the crash, said at the memorial service at the crash site in Clarence on Monday. “I want you to hear that. I don’t know how many hundreds of people went on to dinner tonight because of you folks.”
In other words, those hundreds of people didn’t die in plane crashes in the past decade and a half – and Kausner indicated that the law he and the other family members forced Congress to pass in…
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