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Comment by wck0 | Hacker News Reader

"...an aircraft will generate a sonic boom along the length of its flight path at a rate of one mile per thousand feet."

Can someone explain what is being measured as one mile per thousand feet?

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One mile wide per thousand feet in altitude?

Doesnt matter. Sonic booms have virtually no real power. All the tales of them breaking windows and starting avalanches are pure myth. (See the anti-concorde media campaign.) Forest fires release atomic bomb-levers of energy. A slight puff from a tiny f-15 is a butterfly compared to the winds generated by the fire itself.

Here’s the Brazilian Supreme Court windows breaking from a sonic boom.

https://youtu.be/43Kl7c2yU3g

Yes. One or two breakings here and there when all the conditions are perfect. Look at the mythbusters tests with the usaf. They came to nothing. Ive sat under many an f18 doing a mach1+ flyby (rcaf). Car stereos create more power, and worldwide probably break more glass.

Upon looking at that video again, I have to wonder if the building design and construction didn't play into that as well, with the very overhang taking energy reflected off the ground and directing it back down towards the windows.

>A slight puff from a tiny f-15 is a butterfly compared to the winds generated by the fire itself.

May be all that's required [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I remember sonic booms in the 1960's in the midwest. They weren't worthy of note.

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