In the first full accounting of fatal air cargo crashes in the United States, a Miami Herald examination of thousands of pages of government records documented 69 fatal crashes and 85 deaths since 2000.

Click on the graphic to view an enlarged version detailing the death toll of freight planes.

Yet their work is a driving force of U.S. commerce, with cargo pilots transporting bank records, medical supplies, factory parts, holiday gifts, business letters and scores of other products. It's not just big industry that drives air cargo, but individual consumers who order goods shipped overnight with the tap of a keyboard.

In the U.S., air express accounts for more than 70 percent of air cargo shipments, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found. Revenue for U.S. air and express freight was nearly $30 billion in 2004, a record, a private company found.

Behind the scenes of this bustling industry, cargo planes continue to fall, even as officials say U.S. aviation is safer than ever.

"The safest three-year period in aviation history," FAA spokesman Les Dorr said in a November interview.

Yet U.S. cargo planes crashed with deadly consequences nearly a dozen times a year on average from 2000-04. Every month, another cargo pilot was killed.

The number of fatal crashes dipped to six in 2005, still far more than safety advocates say is acceptable, but the reprieve was temporary. In the first three months of 2006, four cargo planes crashed, one in Tennessee, two in Washington state and another in Montana, taking six lives.

For air cargo, the rules are different.

AN AGING FLEET

Cargo planes have a strike against them even before they take to the air. Many are old -- nearly 26 years old, on average, for the fallen planes, more than three times the age of typical airline passenger aircraft, records show.

Older planes have fewer modern safety features, and they are sometimes plagued by deteriorating engines or breakdowns in crucial flight instruments, a combination that helps trigger cargo's high number of crashes.

"These guys are remote, they are flying at 2 or 3 in the morning. You think an FAA inspector is going to go out and bird-dog somebody like that? Flying out of little, crappy airports?" said former FAA inspector Bart Crotty.

"The FAA is going to spend their oversight dollars . . . on the commercial operators that are flying passengers."