(Bloomberg) -- Investigators of the private-jet crash that killed billionaire Lewis Katz discovered that the sports mogul’s personal pilots almost never performed the required pre-flight safety checks when shuttling their boss around the country.

There were only two occasions out of the last 176 trips of Katz’s Gulfstream IV in which the pilots bothered to fully test the flight controls before takeoffs, according to preliminary reports released Wednesday by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

While the NTSB isn’t yet ready to assign definitive blame for the cause of the crash, the hundreds of pages of documents it released paint a picture of two pilots repeatedly failing to follow basic safety procedures. That includes on their final voyage May 31, which ended with the plane skidding off a Boston- area runway and bursting into flames, killing the pilots, a flight attendant, Katz and three other passengers.

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