AI Was Used to Recreate the Voices of Dead Pilots. The NTSB Responded by Locking Down Its Database. - Firethering
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HomeTechAI Was Used to Recreate the Voices of Dead Pilots. The NTSB...
AI Was Used to Recreate the Voices of Dead Pilots. The NTSB Responded by Locking Down Its Database.
By Mohit Geryani
May 23, 2026
Last updated: May 23, 2026
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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.
NTSB doesn't release cockpit voice recorders from crashes, except in this case they've released an image of a spectrogram. I'm not sure that's a good idea since you can probably reconstruct a lot of audio from the megabytes of data encoded in this image. pic.twitter.com/TpteaY0Tt4<br>— Scott Manley (@DJSnM) May 20, 2026
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.
The gap nobody thought to close
What makes this situation unsettling is that nobody appears to have hacked or leaked anything.
The docket was public because NTSB investigations are supposed to be transparent. The spectrogram was included because it technically was not an audio recording. The transcript was already public. And the AI tools used to stitch everything together are the same kinds of tools millions of people use every day.
Nobody broke into a system or stole cockpit audio from a server. People simply realized that the boundary between image and audio no longer means much once modern AI tools enter the picture.
The NTSB’s response and what it reveals
The agency’s move was immediate. Shut the whole docket system down. Then restore it, but keep 42 investigations closed pending review, including Flight 2976.
That response is telling. The NTSB didn’t have a surgical fix ready because there wasn’t one. You can’t un-include a spectrogram from a filing that’s already been public. You can’t retroactively make the transcript harder to find. The only lever available was access, so they pulled it.
What that means practically is that researchers, journalists, aviation safety advocates, and family members of crash victims lost access to investigation data they had every right to see. A transparency system built around openness suddenly collided with tools that changed what public data can mean.
And this probably will not be the last time something like this happens.
A lot of institutional rules were written for a world where formats stayed in their lanes. Images were images. Audio was audio. Text was text. AI systems increasingly blur those boundaries, and organizations are finding out in real time that policies built around older assumptions do not always hold up anymore.
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Who’s responsible when nobody meant for this to happen?
The person who pointed out the spectrogram could be reconstructed wasn’t trying to harm anyone. The people who ran the reconstruction were curious, or technically...