US scrambles to stop Internet users re-creating dead pilots’ voices
Pilots’ voices from the final seconds of a fatal cargo plane crash have been recreated by internet sleuths using software and AI tools. The release of reconstructed audio recordings prompted a U.S. government agency to suspend all public access to its civilian transportation accident database because federal law prohibits investigators from publicly releasing audio from cockpit voice recorders.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) typically shares factual reports and evidence collected during investigations of aircraft accidents and other civilian transportation incidents. But on May 21, the NTSB announced that the online records system containing that information was “temporarily unavailable” while it reviewed publicly available documents that had allowed people to recreate the cockpit audio recordings of the air disasters.
“The NTSB is aware that advances in image recognition and computer methods have allowed individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum images released as part of NTSB investigations, including the ongoing investigation into last year’s crash 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 plane that crashed shortly after takeoff from Louisville, Kentucky, on November 4, 2025, following a structural failure that caused an engine to physically detach as the plane left the ground. All three pilots on board the plane, including a relief pilot, were killed. Twelve other people on the ground were killed and 23 people were injured.
The U.S. Congress passed a federal law in 1990 prohibiting the NTSB from publicly sharing any part of a cockpit voice or video recorder in order to protect the privacy of air crews. The law followed backlash from airline pilots after a controversial television station aired a cockpit conversation relating to the August 1988 crash of Delta Air Lines Flight 1141 at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
