AI Was Used to Recreate the Voices of Dead Pilots. The NTSB Responded by Locking Down Its Database.

Last year, a UPS cargo plane went down in Louisville, Kentucky. The crew didn't survive. The NTSB opened an investigation, as it does with every major crash, and added the case files to its public docket system, as it also does. Transcripts, data, findings, all of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look. What nobody thought about was the spectrogram. A spectrogram is a visual representation of sound. It takes audio signals, breaks them down into frequencies, and renders them as an image. The NTSB included one in the Flight 2976 docket because federal law prohibits it from releasing actual cockpit voice recordings. The spectrogram felt like a reasonable middle ground, you could see that audio existed without being able to hear it. Then Scott Manley, a YouTuber with a background in physics, pointed out on X that spectrograms encode enough data to work backwards from. The image wasn't just a picture of sound. It contained the sound. People ran with it. Using AI tools, they took the spectrogram and the publicly available transcript and reconstructed approximations of what the cockpit voice recorder actually captured. The voices of two pilots who died in that crash started circulating online. The NTSB shut its entire public docket system down.