Even if they get an excemption, affected people will probably come with pitchforks and torches to the headquarter. These supersonic booms are really loud.
Agreed.
I grew up near[1] the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and I have a very distinct childhood memory of some cadet breaking the sound barrier over our town.
I was (figuratively) knocked out of my bed. It was unbelievably loud. I thought the world was ending.
To be fair, this was probably a very low altitude flight so it was probably much worse than a "normal" sonic boom.
Still...
[1] Canon City, CO
Link to the wiki page if you are curious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
Here are some highlights
- The US Airforce performed ~8 booms per day between 7am and the afternoon
- In the first 14 weeks, 147 windows in the city's two tallest buildings were broken
- An attempt to lodge an injunction against the tests was denied by a district court judge, who said that the plaintiffs could not establish that they suffered any mental or physical harm and that the tests were a vital national need
- Testing was paused for a time when activist groups sought a restraining order against the testing
- The Saturday Review published an article titled The Era of Supersonic Morality, which criticized the manner in which the FAA had targeted a city without consulting local government
- All this public pressure ended the testing early
- There were 9,594 complaints of damage to buildings, 4,629 formal damage claims, and 229 claims for a total of $12,845.32, mostly for broken glass and cracked plaster.
That doesn’t seem much money. Even with inflation which makes it $110,600ish it seems very reasonable. I can imagine one difficult window install making up this much.
I grew up in Germany, and whatever the laws said (probably sonic booms were illegal), they didn't apply for the allied troups (mostly British and American in my region). So jet fighters going supersonic pretty close to the ground were a rather common thing, you might hear one once a week or so.
(Technically, Germany became only with the 2+4 treaty in 1990 a fully souvereign nation, formally ending the occupied state after WW2)
1. https://www.edwards.af.mil/Portals/50/R-2508%20User%27s%20Ha... 2. https://www.edwards.af.mil/About/R-2508/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/world/europe/boom-noise-r...
I assume the military can decide to be exempt from the law if they want
It was mind numbingly loud and obnoxious-the entire house would shake and rattle and you couldn't hear anything but the rumbling.
> In the airline industry’s current tube-and-wings model, shock waves largely roll off and then meld into a sonic boom. The aerodynamic X-plane, however, is designed to scatter multiple shock waves and minimize their cumulative effect, producing only a rumble or soft thump. [1]
> Acoustic engineers have developed a system for measuring sonic booms, called perceived levels of decibels, or PLdB. A decibel (dB) is a measure of pressure; PLdB is what people actually hear. When the Concorde airliner went supersonic, its window-rattling booms scored a PLdB rating of 102, equivalent, for a split second, to the high whine of a fighter engine just feet away. Those are the booms that inspired the original FAA ban. The X-59 has been designed to achieve a PLdB of 75, similar to what might be heard when standing next to a heavily trafficked road. (The numeric drop is larger than it might seem; the decibel scale is logarithmic.) In more conventional units, the Concorde’s supersonic sound waves carried a powerful maximum atmospheric overpressure of two pounds per square foot. By contrast, the X-59’s would exert 0.3 pounds per square foot on the eardrum. [2]
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/aero/nasa-prepares-to-go-public-with-qu... [2] https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/lower-the-boom-1809...