A PDF Let the Internet Hear the Final Words in the Cockpit of a UPS Plane as It Crashed. The NTSB Now Wants It Taken Down
The board said new image-recognition tools let people reconstruct cockpit voice recorder audio, prompting it to halt public access to investigation dockets.
- The National Transportation Safety Board restricted access to its public investigation dockets after discovering individuals used AI tools to recreate pilot voices from the November 4, 2025 crash of UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky.
- Internet users utilized a spectrogram file—a visual representation of audio frequencies—included in the crash docket to reconstruct approximate cockpit voice recordings using AI tools like Codex, then posted the results online.
- Federal law enacted in 1990 prohibits the NTSB from releasing cockpit voice recordings to protect pilot privacy and preserve investigation integrity. Agency officials admitted they were unaware spectrogram imagery could be reversed to generate audio.
- Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy called the unauthorized audio recreation "deeply troubling." On Friday, the agency restored public access to most dockets, excluding 42 investigations including Flight 2976 pending reviews.
- The NTSB is reviewing public records to ensure no other sensitive data could be compromised and is urging platforms like Reddit and X to remove the unauthorized audio posts circulating online.
26 Articles
26 Articles
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The US National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes, has a policy of not releasing cockpit audio recordings. Nonetheless, earlier this week, the NTSB released a spectrographic image derived from the cockpit audio recording that captured the last words of two UPS pilots before their plane crashed in Louisville, Kentucky, last year. Scott Manley, a scientist, developer, and gaming influencer, warned the agency about doing…
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Pilots’ voices from the last seconds of a fatal cargo plane crash have been re-created by Internet sleuths using software and AI tools. The spread of reconstructed audio recordings has prompted a US government agency to suspend all public access to its database of civil transportation accidents—because federal law prohibits investigators from publicly releasing audio from cockpit voice recorders. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB…
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