MISSING PIECES

Preziose's sister, Moira Wade, herself a pilot from Mississippi, spent countless hours revisiting the crash site, pulling hundreds of pounds of the plane's wreckage scattered about -- pieces the NTSB had not collected.

"The first thing I thought of was: He was going to be blamed," Wade said. "When you have a little airplane crash, they're not going to put that much into it. They make mistakes. It's not an exact science."

She questions how the NTSB could cite "spatial disorientation'' when there was no black box. She thinks the government should consider requiring cockpit recorders in small planes with a history of crashes.

"The worst thing that can happen to somebody is to lose a family member and not know why," Wade said. "You wouldn't have the suffering and the pain the family goes through if you could determine the cause of accident pretty quickly."

She adds a sobering reality: "It would cost money, and a lot of people would be opposed to it. . And improvements in aviation are measured by deaths. How many deaths, and how much is it worth, to correct the problem?"

The NTSB said it supports the black box devices, including the retrofit of video recorders to "greatly assist us in our investigations."

In February 2005, the FAA pushed to require upgraded cockpit voice recorders and digital flight recorders for planes with at least 10 passenger seats. The anticipated price for operators to retrofit nearly 10,000 aircraft and install the devices in new planes: $256 million in current dollars, or $421 million over 20 years.

Yet the proposal, which could take effect next year, excluded those aircraft with fewer than 10 seats -- the type of small cargo operators whose planes continue to fall from the sky, and the planes that typically lack the black box devices.

Why not include small cargo planes?

"You're now talking about establishing a new requirement, and that sort of thing is much tougher to get through the rule-making process," said FAA spokesman Les Dorr. "You are talking about imposing a financial burden. I'm not saying one way or another that it is an improper financial burden, but you are talking about creating something new."

Without the black boxes, ''frankly, it just seems easier sometimes to blame the dead guy," said aviation attorney Jerome L. Skinner, with the Chicago-based Nolan Law Group, which has filed lawsuits over Cessna crashes in icing. "He's not there to defend himself."

When the safety board is unable to determine probable cause, families are left with only questions.