science
Release of spectrogram of cockpit recorder audio allows conversation recovery with 'emerging' decades-old tech
The US National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes, has a policy of not releasing cockpit audio recordings.Nonetheless, earlier this week, the NTSB released a spectrographic image derived from the cockpit audio recording that captured the last words of two UPS pilots before their plane crashed in Louisville, Kentucky, last year. Scott Manley, a scientist, developer, and gaming influencer, warned the agency about doing so.
"NTSB doesn't release cockpit voice recorders from crashes, except in this case they've released an image of a spectrogram," he wrote in a social media post on May 20, 2026. "I'm not sure that's a good idea since you can probably reconstruct a lot of audio from the megabytes of data encoded in this image."
Technically savvy individuals promptly turned the soundwave graph back into audio and posted it on the internet, prompting the NTSB to acknowledge it is now aware that advances in image processing and computation allow graphs to be turned back into approximate audio.
