The Digital Airworthiness Protocol: Establishing a Chain of Custody for Visual Reality

This white paper proposes the Digital Airworthiness Protocol, a unified provenance and chain-of-custody framework for digital visual media. Drawing on safety-critical methodologies from aviation, the protocol treats images and videos as evidentiary artifacts whose trustworthiness depends on verifiable origin and integrity rather than visual inspection. The framework introduces a bifurcated architecture: Trusted Capture: hardware-rooted cryptographic signing of sensor data at the moment of acquisition to attest to real-world presence; and Generative Imprint: mandatory, resilient watermarking of AI-generated media to attest to synthetic origin. Both paths converge at a public verification layer that enables human-readable inspection of provenance while remaining machine-verifiable and resilient to common transformations. The paper evaluates existing standards (including C2PA), watermarking techniques, and regulatory initiatives (EU AI Act, U.S. Executive Order on AI Safety), identifies systemic gaps, and proposes a mandate-based implementation strategy. The protocol is origin-agnostic: it does not assess semantic truth, only verifiability of origin and integrity. This work is intended for policymakers, standards bodies, platform architects, and safety-critical system designers concerned with restoring trust in visual evidence.