The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) temporarily restricted access to its docket system after discovering that AI technology had been used to reconstruct the voices of pilots who died in a UPS plane crash last year.The NTSB is legally prohibited from including cockpit recordings in its public records.However, a spectrogram file from the flight's voice recorder was available in the docket.A spectrogram converts audio signals into visual representations, which can then be analyzed and used to approximate the original sounds.Online users, including popular YouTuber Scott Manley, highlighted that these files could potentially be converted back into audio.Using publicly available transcripts and AI tools like Codex, people reconstructed audio from UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky.

In response, the NTSB temporarily closed 42 investigations, including the one related to Flight 2976, pending review, though access to the docket system has since been restored.

This incident raises questions about privacy, ethics, and AI's capability to reproduce sensitive material from publicly available data, highlighting the potential risks of misuse of AI in aviation safety and other industries.