NTSB restricts docket access after AI reconstructs crash audio

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)—the US government agency investigating transportation accidents—temporarily removed public access to its docket system, which serves as the public repository of investigation data. The agency took this action after discovering that the voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash had been re-created using AI and were circulating on the internet. The crash, which involved UPS Flight 2976, occurred last year. While the docket system historically contains troves of data on investigations and has been open to the public, the agency took the system offline to address the spread of the synthesized audio files.

Under federal law, the NTSB is prohibited from including cockpit audio recordings in its public docket system. However, the accident docket for this specific flight did include a spectrogram file of the cockpit voice recorder. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process to turn sound signals, including low and high frequencies, into an image. Scott Manley, a YouTuber whose channel combines physics, astronomy, and video games, noted on X that it could be possible to reconstruct audio from the megabytes of data encoded in that spectrogram image. Because the image encodes megabytes of data representing these frequencies, it contains the underlying information of the original recording.

Following Manley’s observation, individuals took the spectrogram image, along with the publicly available transcript of the flight, to generate audio approximations. According to the NTSB, people used AI tools like Codex to create these approximations of the cockpit voice recorder audio from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. These reconstructed audio files were then shared on social media, prompting the agency to take action.

The agency restored public access to the docket system on Friday. However, to prevent similar issues while it conducts a broader review, the NTSB kept 42 investigations closed pending review. This group of closed files includes the active investigation docket related to UPS Flight 2976.

Why it matters

This incident exposes a new vulnerability in public government data, where technical files like spectrograms—previously considered benign—can be weaponized by AI to bypass legal protections on sensitive audio recordings.