AI recreate voices of dead pilots from crash docs, forcing NTSB to suspend public database access

AI users re-create dead pilots' voices from crash investigation docs

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) usually shares factual reports and evidence gathered from investigations of aircraft crashes and other civil transportation incidents. But on May 21, the NTSB announced that the online docket system containing such information was "temporarily unavailable" as it reviewed the publicly available materials that had enabled people to re-create cockpit audio recordings from aircraft disasters. "The NTSB is aware that advances in image recognition and computational methods have enabled individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum imagery released as part of NTSB investigations, including the ongoing investigation of the crash last year of UPS flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky," according to an NTSB statement. "The NTSB does not release cockpit audio recordings." UPS flight 2976 was a United Parcel Service MD-11F cargo aircraft that crashed shortly after takeoff from Louisville, Kentucky, on November 4, 2025, following a structural failure that led to an engine physically detaching as the aircraft left the ground. The three pilots aboard the aircraft, including a relief pilot, were killed. Another 12 people on the ground were killed, with 23 people being injured. The US Congress enacted a federal law in 1990 prohibiting the NTSB from publicly sharing any part of a cockpit voice or video recorder to protect the privacy of air crews. That law followed airline pilots' pushback over the controversial TV station airing of a cockpit conversation relating to the August 1988 crash of Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. "It's been an important factor for decades in having airline pilots be willing to have their voices recorded at their normal workplace, day in and day out, with the threat of being killed during their workday," Ben Berman, an accident investigator and analyst who previously worked for the NTSB and flew a Boeing 737 for United Airlines, told Ars. "People are horrified with the idea of their last moments being made public and used for anything other than accident investigation, which is why the federal law supports that." As a result, the NTSB takes multiple precautions for securing cockpit voice recorders during investigations of civil aviation incidents. Robert Sumwalt, former chairman of NTSB, has described how the federal agency restricts listening access to a handful of people who must first sign a log and nondisclosure agreement, with cellphones being left outside and handwritten notes being destroyed afterward. Transcription of the audio is done manually through constant replays and group discussions. The Internet does its thing The NTSB released written transcripts of the cockpit audio recordings from the crash of UPS flight 2976 during a two-day investigative hearing held on May 19 and May 20. But the agency also publicly shared a PDF with a spectrogram -- a visual representation of sound signals -- showing the last 30 seconds of cockpit audio recording. That spectrogram apparently enabled a number of individuals to reconstruct audio versions of the pilots' voices and other sounds from the cockpit voice recording, with examples appearing on social media sites such as X and Reddit. The spectrogram itself has also been posted and distributed across social media. Such audio re-creations frequently rely on the Griffin-Lim algorithm that was originally published in a 1984 paper by Daniel Griffin and Jae Lim. Updated versions of the method have since been incorporated into speech processing algorithms and implemented through programming languages such as Python. Various Python implementations of the algorithm are available on GitHub. More recently, the widespread availability of AI models capable of retrieving the necessary information and writing code has made it easier for people to re-create cockpit audio recordings. One account on X mentioned taking just 10 minutes with OpenAI's Codex model to "reconstruct rough audio from the spectrogram" that was initially shared by NTSB. "I was shocked to hear about this, because I hadn't imagined that it was possible to do something like this," Berman told Ars. "But all kinds of things are possible now." Some cockpit audio recordings have been released after NTSB investigations concluded because of lawsuits related to aviation incidents, Berman said. He pointed out that cockpit voice recorder transcripts have also been dramatized through Broadway plays and TV program reenactments. But those examples don't bother Berman as much as the AI-assisted re-creations of pilots' voices based on spectrogram waveforms. It may be too late to stop the spread of re-created audio in the case of UPS flight 2976. But the NTSB's decision to shut down public access to its entire investigations database while it reviews the materials within suggests that the agency is trying to prevent future incidents. The NTSB declined to provide additional comment when contacted by Ars, but said it would share any updates on its website or through its X account. "The NTSB docket system is temporarily unavailable as we examine the scope of the issue and evaluate solutions," according to the NTSB statement. "We hope to restore access to the docket system as soon as possible."

AI is being used to resurrect the voices of dead pilots | TechCrunch

In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, 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 recreated using AI and were circulating on the internet. NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this 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. Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber channel who 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 image. And that's what happened. 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. They used AI tools like Codex, according to posts on social media. The agency restored public access to the docket system on Friday except to 42 investigations, including the one related to Flight 2976, until those reviews have been completed.

People used AI to recreate the voices of pilots killed in a plane crash - Engadget

US transportation regulator NTSB pulled its accident reports after the audio recreations were uploaded online. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has pulled its docket system offline after people used information uploaded to it to recreate the voices of pilots killed in a plane crash with AI. As CNN reports, the agency recently uploaded files filled with details about the November 4, 2025 crash involving UPS flight 2976. One of the plane's engines separated from the wing during takeoff from Louisville, Kentucky, killing three crew members and 12 people on the ground. While the NTSB uploads accident reports that the public can access, it is not allowed by federal law to release cockpit audio recordings "due to the highly sensitive nature of verbal communications inside the cockpit." The NTSB's uploads for the UPS crash included thousands of pages of reports and a video showing the engine's separation. They also included a transcript of the black box recordings and a PDF file with a spectrogram, which shows a graphic representation of the recorded audio in the cockpit. It's through that spectrogram that people were able recreate the last 30 seconds of the flight, while the pilots were struggling to disable the plane, using artificial intelligence. "The NTSB is aware that advances in image recognition and computational methods have enabled individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum imagery released as part of NTSB investigations, including the ongoing investigation of the crash last year of UPS flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky," the board said in its announcement. "The NTSB docket system is temporarily unavailable as we examine the scope of the issue and evaluate solutions." While technology to turn spectrograms back into audio has existed for a while now, AI has made it easier to do so by anybody who has access to it. As Ars Technica reports, one user on X said it took them 10 minutes using OpenAI's Codex to reconstruct audio from the spectrogram the NTSB released. It's not quite clear what the board means by saying that it will "examine the scope of the issue and evaluate solutions," but we wouldn't be surprised if it stops uploading graphic representations of audio in the future.

AI was used to recreate deadly plane crash audio, prompting regulators to step in

Public records helped individuals create AI deepfake audio of a deadly plane crash. Credit: Tada Images / Shutterstock The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is pausing the release of previously public information related to its investigations, after individuals used AI to recreate the last words of deceased pilots. The independent agency was informed that an AI-generated rendering depicting cockpit audio of UPS flight 2976 was created and circulated, using only written documents submitted during the recent hearing, CNN reported. The Nov. 4 crash resulted in the deaths of three crew members and 12 civilians on the ground. "We show our work and we've been doing this type of thing for years. Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture," an NTSB spokesperson told CNN. "NTSB is looking to make sure there's nothing else in the docket that could compromise anybody's privacy... now that we understand the possibility of a digital recreation." Under federal law, the NTSB does not release cockpit voice recordings to the public during investigations of deadly plane crashes. Instead, the agency will submit a transcript for the public record and -- as was the case for flight 2976 -- an audio spectrogram, which visually depicts sound frequencies, duration, and amplitude in a given clip. Individuals were able to use the spectrogram, pulled from the public investigation docket, to digitally recreate the last 30 seconds of cockpit audio before the plane crashed, including the pilot's voices and background sounds. A second clip of recreated audio from an NTSB aircraft test was also circulated online. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Citing privacy concerns, the agency released a public statement explaining their decision to pause access to investigation dockets, writing: