Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should

Let's talk about what's actually happened this week in the aviation world, and then we'll get into what we've been doing this week because we had a lot of fun in the air yesterday.

And then we'll talk about what you've been up to and what you might be up to soon 'cause there's some exciting stuff coming up that I think's gonna be super interesting to people.

Let's talk about something that happened last week that we got a lot of comments on social media, and a bunch of people wrote in, said, "You're gonna talk about this, right?" Yes, we are gonna talk about it.

A popular YouTuber posted the idea of how to recreate cockpit voice recorder audio by reverse engineering the spectral analysis that the NTSB includes in their public docket of an accident investigation.

So they held the investigative hearing, so two days of investigative hearings for the UPS MD-11 crash.

Then, as part of the docket that was released for those investigative hearings, they included the spectral analysis of the audio of the cockpit voice recorder.

As we've talked about before, the cockpit voice recorder audio itself is, by law, never released-

Yeah

... by the NTSB.

It is, by law, prohibited to release the actual audio of the NTSB's in possession, the, the cockpit voice recorder.

But this proposed technical idea-

Hack

... it's just a reverse Fourier transform.

I mean, like, it's been around since the 1800s, or the idea of it has been.

So this is not a new idea.

But I'm not sure why this particular person thought that it was a good idea to do this because, as we know, if you propose an idea to the internet, good or bad, the internet will do it.

Absolutely.

And so a couple folks did and posted what is recreated audio of the final moments of this crew's life and posted it on the internet for all to hear.

And the NTSB found out that this happened and took down the docket systemTo figure out what to do next.

Mm-hmm.

And so they've slowly been replacing the dockets to either not include the spectral analysis or somehow degrade that piece of the docket so as not to provide anyone with the ability to further go back and recreate audio.

Yeah.

In the show notes, I have a very strongly worded statement that we're a family-friendly podcast, so I'm not gonna read verbatim.

But I'm just apoplectic about how somebody thought this was a good idea-

Mm