Ten years after Swissair Flight 111 crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, killing 229 people on board, Nancy Hausman laid a single flower at a memorial and thought of her lost son.

Tom Hausman was 31 years old when he perished in the crash.

"I don't think our life ever gets back to normal," she told CTV Atlantic on Tuesday. "We have seven children and Tom was the youngest. It's affected all of them."

Roughly 100 family members and local residents gathered for the memorial in Bayswater, N.S., where some of the victims are buried. Another memorial site is located at Whalesback, near Peggy's Cove where the plane went down.

Claire Mortimer, who lost her father and stepmother, was another family member who attended the service.

"I miss them every day. You never stop missing them," she said.

The victims came from several different cultural and religious backgrounds, representing 17 different faith communities. In recognition, the memorial featured addresses by seven different religious leaders.

The service began with a call to prayer by Dr. Jamal Badawi, imam to the Muslim community in Nova Scotia. He was followed by speakers who remembered the dead and those who helped after the crash.

The Swissair flight left New York's JFK International Airport late in the evening on Sept. 2, 1998. After less than an hour in the air, co-pilot Stephan Loew thought he detected the smell of smoke.

Loew and pilot Urs Zimmerman contacted air traffic control and were told the nearest airport for an emergency landing was in Halifax, less than 200 kilometres away from their position. But the plane suffered an electrical fire that spread through the cockpit.

Close to Halifax, the pilots steered the plane toward the ocean to dump fuel, but it never made it to the airport. It went down and struck the water nose-first, killing everyone on board.

The Transportation Board of Canada conducted a four-year investigation into the crash, and determined that flammable material in the plane helped the electrical fire to spread. It also urged the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to check the wiring in all Boeing MD-11 planes.

Investigators also discovered that two data recorders on board the plane had stopped functioning, deepening the mystery of what happened in the final six minutes of the flight.

"It was the largest and most complex investigation the TSB has ever done," Wendy Tadros, chair of the TSB, told CTV Atlantic from Ottawa.

In total, the TSB made 23 recommendations to the airline industry. Of those, only five have been fully implemented, although steps have been taken to implement all of the others except for three.

"I think the (U.S. Federal Aviation Administration) has to take a good long look at these issues and pick up the pace," said Tadros.

On Tuesday, Rabbi David Ellis of the Atlantic Jewish Congress helped lead mourners in prayer. But he also wanted answers about whether officials have learned from the crash.

"How come, after 10 years, we are hearing reports that only five of some 20 recommendations for airplanes have been carried out?" he asked.

Dr. John Butt, Nova Scotia's former chief medical examiner, also expressed disappointment.

"I don't know how regulatory authorities are required to respond to these things, but apparently they are not," he told CTV Atlantic.

With a report by CTV Atlantic's Rick Grant in Bayswater and files from The Canadian Press