The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily pulled public access to its docket system this week after discovering that the voices of pilots killed in a cargo plane crash last year had been reconstructed using artificial intelligence and were circulating on the internet, raising urgent questions about the unintended consequences of publicly available accident investigation data.
Federal law prohibits the NTSB from including cockpit voice recorder audio in its public docket system, which otherwise contains extensive data on aviation investigations and has historically been accessible to the public. However, the accident docket for UPS Flight 2976, which crashed in Louisville, Kentucky, included a spectrogram file derived from the voice recorder. A spectrogram converts sound signals, including their high and low frequencies, into a visual image through a mathematical process, creating what is effectively a detailed data fingerprint of the original audio.
The vulnerability was first flagged publicly by Scott Manley, a popular science YouTuber whose channel covers physics, astronomy, and video games. Manley noted on X that the megabytes of data encoded in the spectrogram image could theoretically be used to reconstruct the original audio. That observation proved accurate. Using the spectrogram alongside the publicly available written transcript of the cockpit recording, people used AI tools including Codex to generate approximations of what the voice recorder captured in the moments before the crash, according to the NTSB and posts shared on social media.
The NTSB confirmed the situation on X and moved quickly to suspend public access to the docket system while it assessed the scope of the problem. Access to the system was restored on Friday, but 42 investigations were kept closed pending further review, including the docket related to Flight 2976.
The incident highlights a growing tension between the public interest in transparency around aviation safety investigations and the protections owed to victims and their families. Federal restrictions on cockpit voice recorder audio exist specifically to protect the privacy and dignity of crew members, and the ability to reverse-engineer that audio from a legally permissible data file represents a gap that investigators and policymakers are now being forced to confront.
