The NTSB tries to keep cockpit audio recordings private. AI is making that harder

National The NTSB tries to keep cockpit audio recordings private. AI is making that harder May 30, 20266:00 AM ET Joel Rose Chris Babcock, an engineer at the National Transportation Safety Board, in one of the audition rooms at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Joel Rose/NPR hide caption toggle caption Joel Rose/NPR WASHINGTON — What began as an inquiry into a mysterious sound in the background of an airplane cockpit voice recording escalated into an unexpected challenge for the nation's top safety investigators. National Why flying is still safe despite high-profile problems The National Transportation Safety Board temporarily pulled down public documents for thousands of investigations last week after the agency inadvertently allowed the reconstruction of audio recordings from the cockpit of UPS flight 2976, which crashed shortly after takeoff in Louisville, Ky. last year, killing 15 people, including all three pilots. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have made it easier to reconstruct audio from digital images that were published as part of the NTSB's investigation. And that's making it harder for the NTSB, which is forbidden by law from releasing those recordings, to stop them from being made public. Sponsor Message As investigators at the NTSB listened back to the cockpit voice recording from the crash flight, they heard a "high pitch ringing sound" that began just after the plane rotated for takeoff. But they couldn't figure out what it was. "They're not just looking at the things that people are saying. They're looking at the other ambient sounds, right? Because that might give us some clues," explained Scott Manley, an engineer and YouTuber, in a video he posted last week. Manley noticed NTSB investigators had tried to identify the mysterious sound. In the process, they created what are called spectrograms — basically, visual representations of the frequencies in an audio recording — and made those images available to the public on the...