Looking back on it all now, the Flight 3407 families seem amazed at their own accomplishments.

"The thing that does always stand out to me is the fact that we're just a group of ordinary people who did something extraordinary," said Karen Wielinski, who lived in the house that Flight 3407 struck and whose husband, Doug, died when the plane struck the home.

A quiet revolution

The Flight 3407 crash didn't just shake those who lost love ones. It shook the airline industry, as well as those who oversaw it.

"No one wanted to be the next Colgan Air," the regional airline that operated Flight 3407, said Kevin Kuwik, one of the early leaders of the Flight 3407 families group.

The crash investigation revealed huge safety gaps between such regional airlines and the big carriers that sign them up to handle shorter flights.

For that reason, Randy Babbitt, then the administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, vowed to bring "one level of safety" to the passenger airlines. He started preaching the virtues of the FAA's volunteer safety programs and urged the regional airlines to sign onto them.