Survivor

Carmen Rivera-Worley somehow managed to free herself from the wreckage of this single-engine Piper Cherokee after it slammed into the murky waters of Lake Pontchartrain and sank in about 20 feet of water. Three others, including Rivera-Worley's daughter, died in the crash, which was caused by the failure of a vacuum pump.

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More About

• Carmen Rivera-Worley
• Federal Aviation Administration
• Bryan Scott Taylor
• General Aviation
• Transportation

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But mostly, she's angry at the FAA. Her daughter isn't just a number for the FAA to add to its body count or to somebody's cost-benefit analysis, and neither are the others who died at Lake Pontchartrain and elsewhere, she says. It's wrong that the agency does nothing more when it knows for a fact that if a vacuum pump fails at a critical time, people are very likely to die.

"There was every strike against us. There was no way out of that," Rivera-Worley says and then repeats softly. "There was no way out of that. We were doomed. We were absolutely doomed."