DIFFERENT STANDARDS: Unlike larger passenger aircraft, cargo planes such as this one being loaded at Miami International Airport in March are not required to carry cockpit recorders and digital flight recorders.

The NTSB said an "inadvertent stall'' caused the plane to lose control, that the pilot contributed to the crash because his attention was diverted as ice formed on the airframe, and that he lacked experience in knowing how to deal with such situations.

In the end, the plane encountered icing, and the pilot's attention was diverted -- again, a classic scenario of Cessnas in icing. Yet in its probable cause report, the safety board questioned not the plane -- but the pilot.

It did so even though the plane lacked a cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, tools mandated on commercial jets that help solve why planes fall.

In other cases, the safety board pointed to pilots when cargo operators and family members contend other issues were at play.

"I feel they gave up because it was a bunch of packages in the back," said Todd DeSimone, general manager of Planemasters Ltd., which lost a pilot in Illinois in December 2002. "If you would have had people in the back they would have continued the research until the very end."

That Cessna 208B crashed on approach to the runway at Greater Rockford Airport on a freezing, overcast, gusty evening -- the air traffic controllers losing contact with the pilot moments before.

"The tower personnel advised the dispatcher that they were missing an airplane," NTSB records show.

The probable cause report blamed the pilot, but a lawsuit filed by the victim's family alleges the plane and U.S. air traffic controllers were at fault. The defendants dispute that.

In Alabama, pilot Thomas J. Preziose, 54, was ferrying baseball caps and other cargo for Mid-Atlantic Freight on a familiar route when he radioed, "I needed to deviate, I needed to deviate, I needed to deviate, I needed ... ''

In a moment, the Cessna 208 dubbed Night Ship 282 was down in the swampy water of the Big Bateau Bay, and Preziose, a pilot so practiced that he taught others to fly, was dead.

More than three years later, the NTSB blamed the mysterious 2002 crash on "the pilot's spatial disorientation."

The finding was striking: An initial NTSB report said he "collided in-flight with an unknown object at 3,000 feet." But the final report contradicted that, finding no evidence of an in-flight collision.