The National Transportation Safety Board has temporarily shut down public access to its accident investigation database after internet users used AI tools to re-create cockpit audio recordings from fatal plane crashes.
The NTSB released a spectrogram-a visual representation of sound-from the final 30 seconds of cockpit audio from the November 2025 crash of UPS Flight 2976 in Louisville, Kentucky. Using algorithms like Griffin-Lim and AI models such as OpenAI's Codex, individuals reconstructed the pilots' voices and posted them on social media.
Federal law prohibits the NTSB from publicly releasing cockpit voice recordings to protect crew privacy. The agency is now reviewing how to prevent such re-creations in the future while keeping its docket system offline.