Stable Ergodicity and Frame Flows

In this note we show that all diffeomorphisms close enough to the time-one map of the frame flow on certain negatively curved manifolds are ergodic. As a simple corollary we deduce that the frame flows are ergodic for all compact manifolds with curvature pinched sufficiently close to –1, thus providing results in the case of manifolds of dimension 7 or 8 which were missing from the results of Brin and Karcher.