NTSB Chair gets called out in X (Twitter) community notes for UPS CVR Claim
Posted by Blue_Etalon@reddit | aviation | View on Reddit | 191 comments
Source: X (Twitter) Community Notes
Date: May 21, 2026
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy’s tweet claiming the UPS Flight 2976 CVR data was recovered using “emerging technology” gets called out in Community Notes explaining there was nothing advanced or “emerging” about this. They should have known better.
flying_wrenches@reddit
Please do not post links to the CVR footage.
we (the mod team) would not like that footage on this subreddit.
The modmail inbox was full of people asking that we remove the footage due to a wide variety of reasons from the footage not supposed to be available to the public, to people who personally knew the victims.
Out of respect for them, the victims, and their families we will honor their request.
Good men died
If you have any questions, please send a mod
Mail. Thank you.
ElectricJacob@reddit
Wow! I can't believe we are judging whether a person is "good" or not by their gender.
flying_wrenches@reddit
It was figurative speech called an idiom. I also prefer to believe people are good until proven otherwise.
gamershadow@reddit
Why is this considered more sensitive than all the videos shared here showing them dying?
flying_wrenches@reddit
The best statement I can make, is the “in the public interest” argument. Does a piece of footage serve the public interest. The actual crash footage does, it was a critical piece of evidence for what happened. The CVR? Not as much. It does not make any meaningful difference to the investigation from the publics view.
Another example would be 911 calls. The calls can be public, but some of the info in them will be redacted as a victims phone number for example does not serve the public good.
What change, if any, does the CVR footage serve the public and does it enhance public health safety and well-being?
That’s the corporate response.. the personal response is that it was inappropriate, there was nothing we can learn from the CVR that we don’t already know and it should remain private out of respect for the families and victims.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
I agree the public interest is not served by releasing the audio. I’ll never agree that the audio is of no use to the actual people investigating the accident. How many times have you seen a transcript riddled with “unintelligible”?
CiaphasCain8849@reddit
Because the big bad government said so. Moving on.
lorkan100@reddit
Fr, this is just an internet forum. The cat's out of the bag now.
Besides, the last seconds were not shown on the spectogram, so we're not actually "hearing them dying".
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Agree. No links to the reconstructed audio should be posted. This post is entirely about how the information got into the public domain and the only way to prevent it from happening again is for the NTSB to realize they need to vet technical information like this better.
flying_wrenches@reddit
Absolutely.
The NTSB made a mistake, the comment was mostly for the other people who may post that footage not knowing we don’t want it here.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Roger that
TomChai@reddit
Pretty similar to reconstructing the signal if you can see magnetic patterns on audio tapes, yeah it’s nothing new, pretty much textbook Fourier transform.
cpt_ppppp@reddit
The underlying technology is not new, the ease of which it can be applied has increased significantly.
It's a shame that we turn the perfectly valid point she was making (it's gross to reconstruct the audio) into a technological 'gotcha'.
collin2477@reddit
making taking accountability for data you released instead of blaming “emerging technology” would be a good idea.
CollegeStation17155@reddit
Converting the frequency spectrum into audio is not emerging; it's the whole foundation of how CDs work. Digitizing an image of the spectrum to the ACTUAL frequency spectrum is indeed an "emerging technology" that NTSB could be forgiven for not anticipating the (probable) use of AI to do the heavy lifting. Back in the dark ages (like the 1980s) I had the "pleasure" of digitizing vapor pressure charts in published ersearch papers by hand and eye, and the thought of generating tens of thousands of data points with a digitizer pad and magnifying puck would have been impractical. So to use a new wizz bang technology to create the spectrum just to publish the voices for fun is (as the NTSB chair stated) id divk.
beastpilot@reddit
CDs do not do Fourier transforms. They are direct amplitude samples, not frequency.
marenicolor@reddit
How is taking down the docket and taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again not taking accountability? We're learning, no one anticipated this until it happened. Learning from mistakes is the NTSBs entire ethos.
Unable-Log-4870@reddit
On the other hand, if there’s a few seconds of spectrogram that were included in the report, it’s because of interesting non-human sounds that were in the cockpit at that time. They’re not including a full 5-minutes spectrogram image, at least not one that can be used to recreate sound. So… if the pilots were speaking, that’s going to be incidental to the other sounds. As such, what’s the problem?
Zakery92@reddit
Has anyone theorized on what the noise might have been yet?
Unable-Log-4870@reddit
You mean “why did they include that spectrogram”? I don’t know, I haven’t read the report.
Zakery92@reddit
No, the report mentions a non-human noise they couldn’t identify. I didn’t know if anyone had proposed an answer to that yet
Memory_Less@reddit
Yes, both can be true. Who do we actually authentically see taking responsibility these days? Rhetorical.
GreatScottII@reddit
With your logic, no video, text, or audio transcripts should ever be released in the name of being accountable. That is like telling Volvo not make cars because they cod be misused. The issue at hand is not the NTSB not being "accountable". It is the ones using the data and creating something you (and everyone else) don't like. Thinking before you posted would be a good idea.
Tangential_Diversion@reddit
You should take your own advice on thinking before you comment. The key issue is she made a factually incorrect statement that was then corrected with community notes. None of your slippery slope hypotheticals deal with a factually incorrect statement.
GreatScottII@reddit
I know. If you read the comment, It was dealing with the statement I replied to. You do you though. Slippery hypotheticals..lol.
CantDoThatOnTelevzn@reddit
Slippery slope, false equivalence! If I keep chucking out terms I remember from freshman English, I’m certain to win this battle of wits.
En garde!
ItsMeOnly3@reddit
So: in a slightly different scenario, if somebody uses your car to kill or hurt someone, it's your fault for leaving the car?
tarheelz1995@reddit
For years the NTSB shared the audio. It will be ok.
biggsteve81@reddit
They shared the audio until a federal law was passed prohibiting them from doing so. The NTSB always tries to be as transparent as possible (unlike similar agencies in China and India, among others), while also complying with federal law. The spectrograms are essentially a violation of the law that was not realized by the people at the NTSB who published them, which is why they are removing them and asking people not to share it.
tarheelz1995@reddit
Indeed. My post is a reference to the state of affairs prior to Congress prohibiting this level of transparency. While I have no opinion on the law, the pearl clutching over this is bizarre.
Competitive-Fee6160@reddit
we shouldn’t excuse spreading misinformation just because it was well intended
cpt_ppppp@reddit
I mean, she was factually correct if you want to be a pedant.
Emerging technology can be used to extract audio from visual data. Existing technology can also be used, but it takes more work
mattyb678@reddit
cpt_ppppp@reddit
lol, i actually thought about this meme when I made the comment
NotMyRealUsername13@reddit
Another way of looking at it is that she needs to be made aware that this wasn’t new tech if someone in her org is telling her that it was. Someone, somewhere, made the call to release those images without considering that they could be turned into sound and it’s worth figuring out if they were negligent in making that call.
I suspect it was just legacy SOP, tho, and nobody should hang for it. But the right lessons should be learned anyway…
TomChai@reddit
Well it’s her not getting her point across correctly, just say it’s gross not blame it on tech.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Agree 100%. She’s been great in the job. Gaslighting people for reconstructing data they should have known better than to release was a low point for her.
qalpi@reddit
God knows why you're being down voted, she's absolutely trying to pass the buck
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Anytime you use the word "gaslighting" word police reddit are out there to insist it's being used incorrectly. I could not care less about downvotes.
lyricaldorian@reddit
Or maybe people who've been abused don't like seeing the word being used wrong. Why do you want to make a word useless for us?
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Glad to know of the huge impact I have to the English language. Now let’s do “decimate”
elreyadr0k@reddit
Just say your husband is doing it.
Hareboi@reddit
'Gaslighting'?
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Deflecting blame from yourself by pushing the fault to someone else.
Hareboi@reddit
That's just... deflecting, not gaslighting
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
I'll stick with gaslighting here. This goes beyond deflection.
lyricaldorian@reddit
That's not what gaslighting means though
aftcg@reddit
Let me google that for everyone
https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-gaslighting.html
latedescent@reddit
You have no idea what gaslighting means
BoringBob84@reddit
She is expressing legitimate outrage. Maybe there are people in the agency who could have predicted that AI could allow someone to reconstruct the audio, but the people who released the graphic didn't think to ask the question. Now they know.
To call her statements "gaslighting" is assigning malice to a reasonable mistake. I think that is schadenfreude. We have the benefit of hindsight. The NTSB did not.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Stop drawing the ai into this. It wasn’t reconstructed because of ai. It was reconstructed because they were sloppy in releasing it and because people are soulless ghouls. That it has not happened before is luck more than anything else though it does point to engineers having a good moral code to if they were doing this before have the class not to release it.
BoringBob84@reddit
Both things can be true. As the courts teach us, things don't happen without motive, means, and opportunity.
Soulless ghouls (motive) have always been among us. Advances in technology (means) makes it easier for them to do despicable things when well-meaning people make mistakes (opportunity).
TheRealStepBot@reddit
seems like this leads to the conclusion that engineers are across the board given to not being soulless ghouls then
BoringBob84@reddit
I avoid broad generalizations. I think we can say that people with high levels of expertise worked very hard to get that expertise and have much more to lose (in terms of financial losses, legal risk, career damage, and harm to their professional reputations) than some unemployed, belligerent teenage kid in his Mom's basement, so they are less likely to do ethically reprehensible things.
tapsaff@reddit
It's literally how audio is stored on most cinema projector movies.
Aksds@reddit
Right? If you got the image of the full groove from a vinyl you can recreate the audio
BoringBob84@reddit
Please show us exactly how you would do that, using technology from 1985.
Aksds@reddit
No
BoringBob84@reddit
Then we can dismiss your claim as easily as you made it up.
Aksds@reddit
I never made a claim about 1985
BoringBob84@reddit
I see you trying to move the goal posts. u/TomChai said, "yeah it’s nothing new," and you replied, "Right?"
The NTSB has a valid point. The technology to make this capability available to the general public is new.
Aksds@reddit
Even if I was moving goalposts, they where never in 1985
BoringBob84@reddit
The "gotcha" in the post implied that this capability has been available since 1984.
Aksds@reddit
Okay
Kseries2497@reddit
I'm just spitballing here, but depending on how the image was presented I bet you could run a photocell along the image and use that to drive a stylus and cut a record. It would definitely be a project for a serious hobbyist or a professional though, not like banging "turn this picture back into sound" into ChatGPT or whatever.
noncongruent@reddit
Interestingly, the idea of using a laser to "read" a record instead of a stylus dates back to the 1970s, with some of the first successful attempts occurring in the 1980s. One can do a search on "laser turntable" to get more info on that.
Aksds@reddit
Yeah, that’s basically what I would have imagined
BoringBob84@reddit
Thank you. I agree that such a thing could have been possible with analog technology of the time. You could drive an audio amplifier with the output of the photocell to turn the image into (crappy-quality) audio. Sampling that audio to turn it into digital would require fast analog-to-digital converters (ADC), which were available at the time, but not easily-accessible to the general public. And to widely distribute it would require a radio broadcaster's license or a mass-production facility for cassette tapes or CDs.
SnazzyStooge@reddit
Why was the graphical representation of the CVR data released at all? What purpose would that graphic have except for someone to attempt to recreate CVR data?
Fateful-Huck@reddit
Surprised that no one else is asking this question. This is the one that matters.
SpitefulSeagull@reddit
It's in the report. See Winnie's reply above
winniedemon@reddit
It was a specialist study of the sound spectrum because the CVR team couldn't identify the source of some of the sounds that they heard (specifically, a high pitched ringing sound).
SnazzyStooge@reddit
Didn’t know — thanks!
mduell@reddit
I think it was primarily related to an unidentified 6350 Hz tone.
Hot-Section1805@reddit
Usually to visually show sounds related to the accident, such as unusual noise or vibrations.
TheCygnusWall@reddit
IIRC the NTSB report noted a large spike at a certain frequency and included the image to show it. I don't remember exactly why that spike was important but I think it was evidence that helped them come to the conclusion.
electron_fraud@reddit
I get where the note is coming from but I think it's a bit obtuse. Yes, this has technically been possible for decades. The difference today is that rather than a community of signal processing experts, most of who have the decency not to do this, now any yahoo with a Claude Code subscription can do it without having to know how. That is a substantial difference.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Any yahoo with off the shelf audio processing software can do this without Claude.
BoringBob84@reddit
That isn't the "gotcha" that "readers" claim. There are many technologies that have existed for decades and that have only recently been easily-accessible to the general public. To do this conversion, the computer needs image recognition to convert a graphic into a complex time-domain waveform that comprises all of the simultaneous frequencies of the audio.
I question the "STFT" claim. Fourier transforms convert the time domain to the frequency, domain, which is useful for changing the frequency of a sound, such as a singer who is off key. I see no purpose for STFT for reconstructing audio in its original frequency spectrum in the time domain.
In this case, the person who did this allegedly used AI. Thus, the NTSB claim that the technology was "emerging" was correct. Even if AI had been an existing technology in the miod-1980s, it would have required powerful supercomputers that were only available at universities, corporations, and government agencies - certainly not to the general public. '
sourcefourmini@reddit
I’ve seen no actual evidence of AI usage, just a lot of people assuming there must have been AI because it’s 2026 and anything coding-related has gotten more accessible due to AI. Thing is, you don’t need any coding to reverse a spectrogram. There’s plenty of paid and free software that can already do it. I don’t see any reason to not equally suspect that whoever did it was an audio engineer who saw the images and thought “hey, I analyze these at work all the time”.
BoringBob84@reddit
How much of that software was available for free to the general public in 1985, as well as computers that are powerful enough to run it?
The NTSB has a valid point.
sourcefourmini@reddit
Why are you framing the discussion around 1985? You could do this on a Macbook in 2010. Maybe the NTSB should've checked up on the state of technology in the last 15 years.
BoringBob84@reddit
Read the tweet.
Did you warn then in advance about this possibility, or did you only think of it now, with the benefit of hindsight?
sourcefourmini@reddit
You, three comments ago:
This technology is not one of those. It's been readily accessible for a long time. Anyone who knew what a spectrogram was before this week could've told you that you can extract the original audio from it. It's not like the NTSB got blindsided by a zero-day exploit. They might as well have released a treasure map and then been shocked when someone found the treasure.
BoringBob84@reddit
Making that claim and actually doing it with 1984 technology are far different. A century ago, I could have claimed that I could build a machine to launch 400 people into the stratosphere (where the air is 70 degrees below zero and too thin to breathe) and send them across the planet at near the speed of sound in relative safety and comfort, and for an affordable price. Mine would have been an accurate claim, but it would not have been realistic with the technology that was available at the time.
sourcefourmini@reddit
Okay? And? Your argument here is reading like this:
BoringBob84@reddit
I can see your attempt at a strawman argument, but I will go with it.
NTSB release an exe file that was so huge and that required such enormous amounts of microprocessor resources that it would only run on government supercomputers until very recently.
That is a more relevant analogy.
TheCrudMan@reddit
? you could do this on a 90s PC with 90s software.
BoringBob84@reddit
I believe that would have been possible with a high-end computer, professional (expensive) software, advanced expertise, and a large time investment.
This capability is nothing that was easily-accessible to the general public until recently.
Vast_Engineering_626@reddit
You didn’t need a high end computer for that
TheRealStepBot@reddit
You don’t need to use so many words. Just say I didn’t pay any attention in the few math classes I was required to take and have no idea what’s going.
You don’t need image recognition or ai. It’s entirely signal processing that any good engineer should have been able to figure out as far back as the 80s
Doing this does not in fact take super computer levels of compute. Since at least the 90s or early 2000s
The only use of ai in this is making that information available to normies. Every normie basically has a highly skilled junior engineer in their pocket today.
That no one has published reconstructions like this before is more a happy accident that the people with the skill and the curiosity to do this had the good taste to not release it. This was always a vulnerability in their process.
They are trying to find a way to avoid the unfortunate conclusion that they may not themselves have the brightest engineers working there or they didn’t ask those engineers before releasing this. You don’t have to carry water for their ass covering.
BoringBob84@reddit
You say:
And then you go on to lecture me on a topic in which you lack expertise:
I see that the goalpost has moved from the general public to "any good engineer." Not only would a good engineer not do something so blatantly unethical and morally reprehensible, but a good engineer in the 1980s would not have had access to the equipment to turn that theory into reality, without borrowing the equipment and mainframe super-computers that only existed at large corporations, government agencies, and universities.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
For reference old guy, the 80s are now 46 years in the past. Ie before the lifetime of most practicing good engineers today. What was or was not possible in the 80s is entirely a red herring you choose to focus on. I have personally done stft derived audio reconstruction on my laptop and this has been as I said available in places like matlab or scipy since about the mid 2000s
The point where a good engineer comes into this is asking one to review your release of data to make sure you didn’t inadvertently release information you aren’t supposed to be releasing. Which means either there aren’t good engineers at the ntsb or they weren’t asked.
BoringBob84@reddit
Condescending remarks erode your credibility. They indicate weak arguments, whether that is true or not.
Read the post again. The "gotcha" was the implication that this capability has been available since 1984.
I know how expensive a Matlab license is and the expertise that it takes to use it. For any kid in his Mom's basement to convert this graphic in minutes for free is a new development. The NTSB has a valid point.
I agree with this statement and the NTSB has admitted as much. I also want to be careful with the benefit of hindsight that we have and the NTSB did not at the time. Maybe they had the review and did not know what questions to ask ... "the unknown unknowns," in the words of Donald Rumsfeld.
Up until 9/11, the aviation industry assumed that all hijackers would demand a free ride to an alternate destination and that, for them to commandeer a commercial flight as a suicide missile was unthinkable. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know better.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
I mean the law says don’t release the cvr audio? Seems pretty cut and dry no? Ask the engineers, is there anything in this scheduled release report that might constitute the release of cvr audio? Not really an unknown? There obviously was a process failure and they need to take accountability for that.
How that process failure actually was exploited is largely neither here nor there to the actual failure itself. That’s entirely in the fence at the ntsb. The only thing ai changes is making the ability to exploit a preexisting process failure more common. Acting like this is some new capability they could not have been expected to be aware of is just shifting the blame.
BoringBob84@reddit
That is easy for us to say with the benefit of hindsight.
If someone hacks your online accounts and steals your money, is it your fault for not having strong enough passwords, or does the thief share some responsibility?
TheRealStepBot@reddit
I mean did you scrawl the password on a tear off flier and staple them to every telephone pole in your neighborhood? This wasn’t a password strength issue.
It was a why did you tell the public the password question?
BoringBob84@reddit
I believe that hindsight is clouding your logic. I believe the NTSB when they claim that they intended to comply with the law and not release the audio.
The question here is, "Should the NTSB reasonably have known that reconstructing the audio from the graphic was within the capability of the general public?"
In hindsight, the answer is clearly, "Yes." However, it would not have been so obvious at the time. Normalcy bias is powerful, and we cannot discover the "unknown unknowns" unless we make a consistent effort.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Which leads to the need for review. Did someone at the ntsb know the answer was yes? Were they asked? Did they actually say yes and got overridden?
If the answer is no one there knew, fine normality bias is a thing, do better.
But if it comes out that there is more here changes are required.
BoringBob84@reddit
I absolutely agree! And I also think that the NTSB is uniquely-qualified to perform a detailed investigation, to determine every contributing factor, to identify root causes, and to recommend solutions.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
And no it’s not some crazy idea no one could have conceived. I have definitely flagged and explicitly falsified data in marketing and sales presentations at work to prevent communication of sensitive information to other sophisticated viewers.
We get sent to conferences explicitly to look at competitors slide decks for inadvertently disclosed technical information of all kinds. The assumption that smart antagonistic people will look at the information you put out to the public is not some great mystery only known to a few people.
It’s a basic failure of an organizational theory of mind. The assumption aught to be in any organization that anything you can do your opponents can do as well. Any time you release internal artifacts from technical processes that is immediately cause for review.
But then again I’m not a government engineer reporting to a government lawyer so I’m actually somewhat good at my job.
BoringBob84@reddit
And yet, we are not having this conversation until after the shithead exploited the NTSB's mistake.
All the smart guys here weren't warning the NTSB in advance that this was likely.
I think it is schadenfreude.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
It’s process failure that needs to be reviewed and owned.
We don’t review airplane flights unless they crash. The meta airplane crash review airplane just had maybe not a crash but a reportable incident that needs to be corrected.
It’s just how engineers work. We get to run our own ship because we hold ourselves accountable. This is a public facing failure that needs to be reviewed.
I don’t think in and of itself it’s that serious but it may well reveal as such things tend to a broader pattern of not adequately including technical personnel in final go no go decisions.
I will never not argue for executives and lawyers to be held to account every time there is even a wisp of smoke that looks like an opportunity for more engineering control of process. We engineers need to stick up for ourselves, not just because it’s beneficial to us but because it’s better for society and reduces harm.
BoringBob84@reddit
I absolutely agree. I believe that the NTSB is doing that. They said, "NTSB is taking steps to address this issue."
My issue here is with the implication that it should have been obvious to the NTSB in advance that this was likely. I think that is equal parts of hindsight bias and schadenfreude.
In my experience, we do - usually it is for a safety incident, even if nothing was damaged and no one was hurt. Sometimes, it is to troubleshoot a particularly difficult equipment problem.
Ok_Muffin_925@reddit
If this is the case, then why are body cam videos all over the internet? I mean a pilot is licensed and responsible for the lives of all those aboard and those on the ground if they crash. I can see the emotional arguments for not releasing or posting but at the same time it causes me to question why would some person who is living their own life wind up all over the internet just because they became part of a police interaction? I'm not even taking about hardened criminals, but bystanders, family members, and suspects who were never charged or indicted. Case in point: one of the many innocent drivers charged with DUI who had zero drugs or alcohol in their system. Their reputations were harmed by all the postings.
Own_Reaction9442@reddit
Because, at the behest of pilot unions, Congress passed a law forbidding the release of CVR audio. As I recall this was part of a deal to get the unions to agree to longer CVR durations, but I might be conflating two things.
malcifer11@reddit
I don’t like how they’re making this into a moral issue. Feels like scapegoating the person who did a simple computer audio operation on data that they negligently released. Turning light into audio is how audio works. This isn’t some nefarious new technology, and the audio wasn’t shared to exploit or sensationalize. They need to be more apologetic and less aggressive, this is disingenuous
t-poke@reddit
Does anyone have a link to an example of this being done with not the CVR transcript? Like, some other random audio, a song, something. Rickroll me with it for all I care.
I’m just curious to see how well audio can be reconstructed from spectrum images.
unclefire@reddit
Scott Manley on YouTube shows this and explains how it works.
ev3to@reddit
Emerging technology has moved audio reconstruction from an image into the domain of the mundane. Yes, the technique has existed since 1984, but good luck to "the average Joe" actually implementing it until recently.
As recently as 10 years ago it was demonstrated but required thousands of dollars of specialized technology.
In short, the "Readers added context", well, doesn't. It's just a "well actually" bit of snark.
mduell@reddit
There’s a nearly 20 year old project on sourceforge that does it specifically from spectrograph images.
950771dd@reddit
Bullshit.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Matlab and Apple Logic would like a word
cyberentomology@reddit
If laws against releasing audio exist, why are they publishing waveforms?
NeighborhoodLoud4884@reddit
Lol such an incompetent amateur. Crazy how these clueless ppl make it into those positions. Well guess it's all about connections, skills don't matter
Being_a_Mitch@reddit
I don't think it's fair to criticize her for this. She knows CVR data can't be released, but didn't realize you can reconstruct audio from a picture of a spectogram (I'm a professional pilot, I didn't know that). The audio experts that do this analysis are likely audio experts who didn't realize leaking the ability to reconstruct audio would be bad.
This whole situation is so weirdly overblown to me. The NTSB just takes down the docket system for awhile, removes the audio images from them, and then restored to normal. This isn't a huge deal or major scandal to me.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
No one cares about your opinion here then. Pilots drive the busses. No one expects you to understand how the bus works or the physics and math of it all.
The ntsb is not a pilot organization but a an engineering organization. The problem is that an engineer certainly produced that spectrogram for some investigative purpose and then it somehow got released without engineering review or despite engineering review. In either case requiring a modification of process. Was an engineer asked to do a final review of what is released? Did they flag this? Did they have the legal training to know to focus the release review on preventing cvr reconstruction? Did they flag it and it got released anyway?
TheCreepyFuckr@reddit
Take your own advice, mate.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Engineers demand review of engineering failure to improve process.
Pilots: shut up nerd
aviation-ModTeam@reddit
Your comment has been removed for breaking the r/aviation rules.
This subreddit is open for civil, friendly discussion about our common interest, aviation. Excessively rude, mean, unfriendly, or hostile conduct is not permitted. Any form of racism or hate speech will not be tolerated.
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TheCreepyFuckr@reddit
Oh, is that what you’re doing? From my perspective it looks like a redditor trying to force his opinion as fact while doing nothing to provide any backing for their claim.
Why don’t you point out where pilots are trying to silence this? I’ll wait.
NeighborhoodLoud4884@reddit
Once something has been published to the internet, it's impossible to remove it again. It has been downloaded & stored across thousands of computers worldwide. This horse has left the barn. No point in removing it from the docket now. Well ok guess they have to for legal reason but still, in practice is pretty pointless.
Anyway my take was mostly about the incorrect statements "manipulation" and "emerging technologies". There is no manipulation involved here, it's simply reconstruction. The technology isn't new at all, this has been known for decades.
biggsteve81@reddit
Do you think there is any one person who knows everything about every aspect of their field of work? Homendy's areas of expertise are legislation and policy; her primary objective is to manage the NTSB and communicate their findings. They have regular staff who do the actual investigative work. Perhaps one of them (an audio expert) should have pointed out to the board that they should not include audio spectrograms in the reports.
Hareboi@reddit
Yeah, which is why I don't understand the post, let alone with the wording of 'gets called out'. It's just a technical correction, but we've been conditioned to antagonize each other on social media so much that it instantly gets screenshotted and posted as a 'gotcha' and anyone who's the 'victim' of a community note deserves ridicule for some reason
ItsMeOnly3@reddit
Gonna play the devil's advocate here: obviously the reconstruction/resynthesis algorithms existed before as has the software to do it. However whomever used it, had at least emotional intelligence to refrain themselves from publishing the result. Now every idiot can ask GPT to do it for them.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
The decency and common sense not to post things like this are completely unrelated to the fact that the NTSB could have just as well published the audio.
biggsteve81@reddit
The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from releasing CVR audio recordings.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
And yet, that's essentially what they did and didn't realize it.
FutureHoo@reddit
It was a mistake. It’s not the end of the world. They recognized their mistake and rectified it almost immediately. What else do you want them to do at this point?
We saw like 15 different angles of the plane getting blown into smithereens, saw 15 different angles of the pilots last moments alive yet this is where people are choosing to draw the line of decency? Not saying that the CVR tape reconstructions should be released but nobody here including the mods had this outrage with the crash clips
Shark-Force@reddit
Same and her freaking out on twitter is never going to get it removed, is it her first day on the internet? NRSB fucked up, oh well learn from the mistake. Am I supposed to feel outage at people who want to listen to the CVR? Why should I feel outrage over that and not outrage over the bad maintenance that caused the crash? Dumb.
marenicolor@reddit
I don't think she's freaking out. In a direct way, she gives voice to the victims and their loved ones of such tragedies. I think her decision to make that tweet was a way to channel/amplify to the public the outrage families and loved ones must be feeling currently.
Shark-Force@reddit
Nobody said she wasn't. She's entitled to make the wrong choice aka the Streisand Effect.
jsttob@reddit
This comment should be pinned. You are one of the only ones talking sense.
Amazing how easily people can get swept away with the rest of the mob…
Timely_Entrance_7931@reddit
No, they release information to be transparent. Idiots who have no moral compass and have the selfish need to hear someone’s pain and anguish use it to recreate audio that is unnecessary to the cause. We have transcripts, in writing, of what was said on the flight deck. Leave it at that you psychos.
ItsMeOnly3@reddit
Don't mistake obliviousness with transparency.
airwx@reddit
There is zero reason to publish the audio.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Who is claiming there is a reason?
Timely_Entrance_7931@reddit
I think you’re arguing for the sake of arguing.
Timely_Entrance_7931@reddit
The point I am trying to make right here. Be a good person, don’t recreate the audio of a family’s note dead loved ones. Nobody needs to hear it. The transcript gives you all the info you need. The vocals are just unnecessary.
FantasticFinance6906@reddit
I see this as a classic “just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it” moment.
NeedleGunMonkey@reddit
I don’t understand the argument being made here.
The NTSB made a mistake.
The people who recreated it THEN posted it are the kind of people who never stop to question “because I can does it mean maybe I should?”
And then there’s the chorus here acting like spoiled children getting offended by proxy that she’s upset about it.
FutureHoo@reddit
It’s funny bc I never saw this outrage on this sub and elsewhere for the 15 different angles we saw of the aircraft crashing, for the 25 different angles of the pilots last moments alive (and their death)
Yet this is where people are choosing to draw the line? What lol.
polarisdelta@reddit
The footage was of a machine experiencing a malfunction. Impersonal. An inanimate object. The People inside it are an abstraction whose behavior conforms to training norms and mathematical models of stress. They're part of the machine. We do not process their trauma from the view of the ball of fire passing by the airport.
The audio reconstruction is the opposite of that. The emotional response is what makes it gross.
No, of course it's not rational.
FutureHoo@reddit
If the video taken from the trucker’s POV of the plane careening into a fireball 50yds from him doesn’t elicit an emotional response for you, I don’t know what to tell you
jsttob@reddit
Give me a break, lol.
Ok-Parfait-9856@reddit
Remember most people you encounter on this site are bots or children. This sub isn’t small either, so it’s in every randoms feed
silver-fusion@reddit
It's super weird to me too.
For pilots the audio recordings are critical information. The speed at which events happen in the cockpit, even the emotional response are hugely valuable mental preparation for an incident.
I can absolutely understand friends, family of the deceased perhaps not wanting to listen - although pretty much every single CVR I have heard has demonstrated bravery and or heroism in the final moments - but, as far as I understand it, noone is being forced to listen.
Events like these demonstrate that this isn't a normal job. These guys and girls are taking a risk at every push back.
CVRs were available for years until 1141 which showed pilots being unprofessional in the cockpit. It led to the sterile cockpit reforms of today and it was lobbied for removal by the pilot unions and airlines to make sure the consumer confidence (bottom line) wasn't impacted.
P5YcHo299@reddit
Did I miss another mishap? Or was this something from a while ago..
FutureHoo@reddit
I’m referring to the UPS crash videos
nav13eh@reddit
There is a line of thinking in the cybersec industry that the best way to bring attention to an exploit is to prove how it can be used maliciously. Then the people responsible for the software have no choice but to fix it or risk mass exploitation. In the end, the entire industry is more secure.
But there's one important caveat to all this. That is that most of the time there are disclosure windows where the exploit is reportes quietly until it has been fixed.
I'm not sure if the person who did the recreation contacted the NTSB privately about the problem before posting it online. Maybe they did and the NTSB blew them off so they had no choice but to post publicly and force their hand. If that version of events is true, then it may have been a necessary evil to save others.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
She runs an agency that depends heavily on forensic scientific analysis. Yes, if she said "we mistakenly released this data" I'd agree. That's not what happened. As I've noted, I think she's been a god chairperson.
NeedleGunMonkey@reddit
Buddy what are you making noise being outraged about.
The NTSB made a mistake. The folks who recreated it THEN published it are shitheads.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Hey skipper, I'm not your buddy. You're attempting to hijack this post going down a completely different subject. I'm not outraged. I'm concerned the NTSB is behaving like they don't understand key forensic technology. Why is that so difficult for you to understand? Feel free to post your own thread on that subject.
Timely_Entrance_7931@reddit
Why don’t people understand that people hearing their loved ones last words might be something they can’t handle, and all these people so selfishly recreating the audio are just being assholes. There’s no reason to hear someone’s last words and terror. Just because you CAN doesn’t mean you SHOULD. All this preaching of being “kind” to people, then you go off and destroy the family by recreating their dead loved ones last words. Disgusting.
torsten_dev@reddit
I think it was correct to call out her use of "Manipulated".
The reconstruction is not AI slop hallucinations or disinfo and as such would not fall under "False or manipulated content" policies.
phluidity@reddit
I haven't listened to the reconstruction, nor do I intend to, but until someone can compare the reconstruction from the actual CVR, I think it is fair to withhold judgement on if it was manipulated or not. It could be that the original reconstructed audio was not legible and other tools were used to "clean it up" based on assumptions of what would be there. It could be that it was very clear already and matches.
NYPuppers@reddit
anybody arguing against her on this is on the losing side. i can just imagine them pushing the glasses up on their nose and being like "well actually.... in 1984..."
the answer is that AI makes this wildly easy and its despicable that people do it. the FAA is not the bad guy for not anticipating how horrible people can be.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Stop blaming ai for lawyers not asking engineers or if they did ask engineers those engineers giving the wrong answers. The stft should never have been released.
For that matter how do we know the place ai comes into this isn’t internally at the ntsb? Maybe they asked an ai to review the release of information and it missed this?
The point is there is a stage gate here and something came through the gate that should not have.
Is it true that in a nice world people would have had the class to not reconstruct it or if they did at the very least keep it to themselves? 100% but that’s not the world we live in and that didn’t start after the ntsb released this. They need to make process improvements to make sure there is adequate technical review of not just their conclusions but the information they release.
Inmytanks@reddit
If they cared they much about this happening… the decision to just not releasing the visualized data should’ve been an obvious one.
DDX1837@reddit
I don't see anyone getting called out.
What is new (or emerging) is the technology which makes it possible for just about anyone to pull the audio from the visualized data.
There are a number of instances where something was theoretically possible but required expensive equipment and knowledge and skills which the average person didn't have. But then "emerging technology" made it possible for anyone to do.
SpatulaWholesale@reddit
What's "deeply troubling" is that an organization whose entire job is logical, dispassionate investigation and analysis didn't think to ask a mathematician before posting this drivel.
Wedge_Donovan@reddit
Come off it, dude.
Jennifer Homendy and the NTSB are a massive net positive for our industry, aviation safety, and the general flying public.
After all the incredible and professional work they've done, attempting to skewer them over a mistake that they immediately rectified, when there are so many examples of government employees actively working against our interests, is the "deeply troubling" part.
SpatulaWholesale@reddit
"deeply troubling" is her wording.
Come on, though, don't over-play it. I'm not bashing the NTSB, I'm laughing at a gaff.
figure0902@reddit
Well I am a mathematician and a computer scientist and her point is valid. Emerging technology makes it easier to access software that can do this for you, making it more likely this will happen. She may not understand the math but she understands consequences.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Why are you carrying water for them? Stft can be reversed. Always have been reversible. Lossy but reversible. That this has not happened before is mostly luck, that those with the skill and curiosity to do this have had the maturity to not then release it publicly. Or maybe most people with the skill simply did not care to know. I know I sure don’t have any interest in such a cursed task.
But in fairness they are supposed to be an engineering org and this is a failure that point to insufficient communication with engineers or insufficient skill by their engineers or even insufficient legal training for the engineers tasked with the review of this. That’s why she is trying to throw this at the feet of ai. It’s not an ai problem it’s a technical slip up on their end.
Likely as not this was an avoidable failure caused by a process deficiency in the org and if they take accountability for that it can improve the org and the results of future investigations. There is absolutely no reason to defend this ass covering.
WallyMcBeetus@reddit
And now it's far easier to manipulate that as well, and disseminate it everywhere. No esoteric skills required.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
You’re getting downvoted but that is precisely why she is ass covering so hard and trying to blame ai.
No you are supposedly an engineering run org but either don’t have very good engineers reviewing releases or just don’t ask then.
Anyone who has experience in signal processing could tell you this was possible. Posting the complete fft would have been fine, but the inclusion of a time axis with frequency information is bad. It slightly harms phase recovery but not irreparably so.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
I’m not a mathematician, I’m an engineer who has used FFT tech since the 80’s. It seemed clear from the minute I saw that picture what would probably happen.
950771dd@reddit
No it didn't. Now that it was done, it's clear to you.
Turns out in the three decades before, no one tried, including you, to whom "it was clear" all the time.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
What in the world are you talking about? Of course it was clear since it's something I've used to reconstruct frequency data in other technical fields. This is the basis for all consumer digital audio since CDs.
SpatulaWholesale@reddit
I think the implication is that if you had known about these algorithms and methods then you would have been generating CVR audio all this time and posting it on the Internet for people with a death fetish to consume...
... instead of, you know, being a human being and leaving that stuff alone.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
You're projecting something I neither implied or thought. This is about a federal investigative agency mistakenly releasing data they should have known better than to release. The fact they ended up taking the entire docket down for all cases to scrub them makes me wonder how many other times this was published. I personally have never looked, but if I had, and saw an audio spectrograph like this one I definitely would have realize this could happen. I came across this particular one watching Scott Manley's YouTube channel where he made the same observation.
SpatulaWholesale@reddit
I'm arguing on your side, dude. You're the human being in what I wrote.
Blue_Etalon@reddit (OP)
Ok. The use of “you” twice threw me. Peace
figure0902@reddit
Again.. But AI is making is such that almost anyone can now access this information, so now is a time to focus on legislating this. What are you even trying to say? Seriously, this is starting to sound more like op is trying to get his rocks off to humiliation or something. Gross.
SpatulaWholesale@reddit
No not at all. I think some people have a dark curiosity for these recordings, but I don't think that curiosity, or fetish even, should be fed by the desperate final words of strangers. They have no right to it. It's invasive. It's intrusive. It's disgusting.
I don't object to the NTSB scrubbing their database of spectrographs. Their mistake was not realizing the possibility of transforming it data back to audio. That's a good thing.
What's shocking is their unawareness of the possibility. Yes, the software may be more accessible today... but FFTs and algorithms have been available for decades. And not secret.
It's the "OMG MATH!" aspect that's disappointing. Like just finding out the word "dumb" has a "b" in it, and assuming nobody else knew either.
Legal-Championship64@reddit
I think the distinction here is a bit more nuanced than the community note portrays. Yes, the methodology of decoding spectrograms has been around for decades, but that process is now orders of magnitude more accessible to the general public than in prior decades thanks to ai-powered vibe coding.
FoxFyer@reddit
Yes, this spectrogram wasn't converted into audio by some hardcore audio hobbyist well-versed in "phase recovery via iterative inverse STFT", it was made by someone who showed the picture to a slopbot.
figure0902@reddit
What are you even talking about? Emergent technology IS making it much more easy to do this than before. Whether she understands the math or why this is happening is irrelevant, she understands the consequences and the importance of having legislation once this type of technology becomes so readily available. I'm smelling a grifter OP here.
TheRealStepBot@reddit
Let’s ban math. That’s a great idea
collin2477@reddit
how are they going to legislate to make fourier transforms less available lol. seems like this is more of an issue of releasing CVR data when there is already a law against it.
ambushsabre@reddit
To be fair I think going straight to legislation is a bit extreme; what is there even here to legislate? If they want to stop releasing the images that would make sense, but you can’t put the math genie back in the bottle, nor would we want to (see cryptography)
Accommod8me@reddit
Can we just relax, let them do their job and read the final report when it's published to figure out the cause of the accident please?
beneoin@reddit
It’s also quite troubling that the NTSB Chair has already ruled that this was an accident. I thought the investigation was ongoing?
biggsteve81@reddit
NTSab investigates "accidents and incidents." An "incident" is an "accident" where nobody was killed, according to their terminology. The NTSB does not assign blame for accidents, and their reports cannot be used in lawsuits.
beneoin@reddit
TIL. I thought they used incident until the end of the investigation.
Apprehensive_Cost937@reddit
If someone was fatally or seriously injured (in the aircraft, got hit by the aircraft, or due to jet blast), or if aircraft sustained serious damage or structural failure, it is by definition an accident.
Ashamed-Sir3248@reddit
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lordwow@reddit
Look, I generally think Homendy is pretty effective, she's done good work calling out some FAA BS. But this is a bad hot take for sure.
Frank_Tj_mackey_28@reddit
Is being a complete moron a requirement to get an executive position today?
aviation-ModTeam@reddit
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