When the Piper Cherokee hit Lake Pontchartrain, the impact ripped it open. Taylor radioed that he didn't know whether he was climbing, then quickly realized he had lost control of the airplane and was about to crash. The New Orleans air traffic controller told Taylor he missed the airport. He needed those instruments, the artificial horizon and the directional gyroscope, to climb up out of the cloud cover or drop below it where he could see the ground and use his senses to level the plane and land it. The sky around him was as dark as the swampy, expansive Lake Pontchartrain below. It powered two important instruments Taylor was using to keep the airplane level and pointed in the right direction. They didn't know it, but a vacuum pump installed in the 1969 Piper Cherokee 16 years before had stopped working. Don't take my baby daughter.Anything but this." Please come to our help.Don't let us die like this. Sarah glanced back and looked into her mother's eyes, acknowledging the gesture before putting her head down. Rivera-Worley held onto her daughter's arm. The airplane continued to buffet violently. She laid her head against Scott's back and extended one arm in front of him so that she could hold onto Sarah, her 17-year-old daughter, in the front right seat. Rivera-Worley also leaned forward, suddenly sick with fear. The other backseat passenger next to Rivera-Worley, John Scott, unbuckled his seat belt and leaned his head and shoulders into the cockpit offering Taylor help. For a few seconds after a hard turn, it seemed they were recovering. Taylor and everyone else on board became disoriented. Without instruments and in zero visibility, the passengers and pilot had no point of reference. ![]() The rest of the instruments, the ones that literally could tell Taylor up from down while flying blind, are out now, too, he announced. Taylor banked hard, pushing Rivera-Worley against the airplane wall. Suddenly, with a roller coaster's stomach-wrenching force, the airplane fell into a dive. "See?" he said, noting the condensation under the glass. Taylor's artificial horizon, a device that tells a pilot whether the aircraft is flying with wings level or banked, suddenly didn't seem to be working properly. Then, Rivera-Worley and the two other passengers heard pilot Bryan Scott Taylor say, "I've got an instrument failure." ![]() Raindrops streaked the plane's windows as it raced at about 120 mph through a blanket of ink-black clouds west of New Orleans. From the backseat of the single-engine airplane, Carmen Rivera-Worley watched uncomfortably as the 25-year-old pilot tapped his finger on an illuminated blue instrument.
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