NTSB shuts public docket system after AI reconstructed dead pilots' voices from published spectrogram

A UPS cargo plane crashed in Louisville, Kentucky last year. The NTSB published a spectrogram (a visual representation of sound) in the public docket because federal law prohibits releasing actual cockpit voice recordings. YouTuber Scott Manley noted on X that spectrograms encode enough data to reconstruct audio. Using AI tools, people took the spectrogram and the publicly available transcript to reconstruct approximations of the cockpit voice recorder, and voices of the two deceased pilots circulated online.

The NTSB shut its entire public docket system down, then restored it while keeping 42 investigations closed pending review, including Flight 2976. The agency had no surgical fix available because the spectrogram had already been public and the transcript was already accessible; the only lever was access itself.

Researchers, journalists, aviation safety advocates, and family members of crash victims lost access to investigation data. No one involved—the person who pointed out the spectrogram vulnerability, those who ran the reconstruction, or the NTSB publishing in good faith—intended harm, yet the federal rule banning cockpit recording release was circumvented by the gap between what the policy assumed (formats stay separate) and what AI tools now enable (formats blur together).