"I'm not sure why we need to wait until one crashes in the middle of Disneyland before people are going to take notice of the fact that these planes are going down," said Lara Goldman Lennon. Her husband, Thomas, died in an MU-2 that crashed in 2004 in a driveway near Baltimore-Washington International Airport while transporting canceled checks.

LOW PRIORITY FOR FAA

Despite these problems, the FAA and major industry groups have not heeded pleas to set a standard level of safety, even as the government's own dwindling inspection force often leaves companies to monitor themselves.

The FAA, the federal agency charged with keeping the skies safe, has failed to address the industry's most serious problems. Time and again, the FAA has been chided by safety advocates and government regulators for not aggressively monitoring air cargo.

A deadly Miami crash in 1997 shed light on how lax the FAA was, and nine years later, criticism continues as more planes fall.

"The Federal Aviation Administration spent very few resources on cargo oversight," said Mary F. Schiavo, former inspector general of the U.S. Department of Transportation. "It equals a greater risk, and sometimes it means a loss of life."

Pilots and safety advocates say the industry receives less attention because of a striking numbers game: When a cargo plane falls, the body count is typically one -- the single pilot, often flying for an obscure company.

"The FAA is spread very thin and they're concerned more with passenger operations than with freight," said Jonathon Ford, a veteran cargo pilot. "If a freight plane goes down, you are only going to lose a pilot, and if a passenger plane goes down you are going to lose a lot of people."

Yet the industry's safety implications extend beyond single pilots. More than a dozen times since 2000, cargo planes have crashed on residential streets, in driveways, on golf courses, in a lake near high-rise condos or near shopping centers and construction sites -- in some cases, just missing clusters of people.

The planes' bellies are filled with potential hazards. They crisscross the country ferrying explosives, poisons, oxidizers, corrosives, flammable liquids, gases, batteries, aerosols, nitric acid and sulfuric acid, FAA records show.

LOW-PROFILE INDUSTRY

While FedEx and UPS, the world's two biggest cargo carriers, are household names, the plethora of smaller operators are not. But they help fuel the industry's economic engine.

Cargo pilots fly in an industry that remains very much under the public radar. Their planes typically travel late at night into small airports far from the congested hubs most travelers encounter, with names such as Pang-born Memorial, Skagit Regional, Lee Gilmer Memorial, Gaylord Regional and Keene Dillant-Hopkins airports.

The men and women who fly these planes often do so for scant pay and in the shadow of high-profile airline pilots. Some have come up with a nickname that captures their navigational skill and risky work: freight dogs. In their profession, small cargo pilots are at the bottom tier.