LOS ANGELES—As helicopter pilot Ara Zobayan encountered a cloud bank and decided to try to climb out of it, he was likely worried about getting his star client, Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and six others to a girls basketball tournament, federal safety investigators said. That decision cost them all their lives, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday in releasing long-awaited findings of the Jan. 26, 2020 crash that killed all nine aboard. The NTSB primarily blamed Zobayan for a series of poor decisions that led him to fly blindly into a wall of clouds where he became so disoriented he thought he was climbing when the craft was plunging toward a Southern California hillside. Zobayan, an experienced pilot, ignored his training, violated flight rules by flying into conditions where he couldn’t see, and failed to take alternate measures, such as landing or switching to auto-pilot, that would have averted …