NTSB docket – The NTSB temporarily shut down access to its docket system after finding that voices of pilots killed in a UPS plane crash had been re-created using AI and circulated online. The agency had restricted cockpit audio because federal law bars it—yet the Flight 29
For a system built to document catastrophe with cold, public facts, the NTSB found itself facing something far more unsettling: voices.
The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been re-created using AI and were circulating on the internet.
Under federal law. the NTSB is prohibited from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system. even though the platform otherwise holds extensive data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. In this case, the accident docket for the flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder.
A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to turn sound signals—including low and high frequencies—into an image. On X. Scott Manley. a popular YouTuber whose channel combines physics. astronomy. and video games. pointed out that it could be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that image.
That reconstruction didn’t stay a theory. People took the spectrogram. along with the publicly available transcript. to create approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville. Kentucky. according to the NTSB. Posts on social media say the effort used AI tools like Codex.
The agency restored public access to the docket system on Friday, but it did not simply shrug and move on. It kept 42 investigations closed pending review—including the one related to Flight 2976—buying time to assess what else could be reinterpreted. reconstructed. or re-synthesized from what was thought to be safely public.
Behind the procedural steps sits a new kind of risk for public digital records: the moment an investigation file contains a usable representation of human sound, the conversation can shift from analysis of an accident to imitation of the people who didn’t survive it.
NTSB AI voices UPS Flight 2976 cockpit voice recorder spectrogram Codex cybersecurity digital investigations Louisville Kentucky AI reconstruction