Supersonic flight returning to US after half-century ban
forbes.com
forbes.com
Economy needs more passengers but I doubt you could make an all business class flight at the size of a typical airplane and sell enough tickets to make up for the lost economy passengers.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/travel/our-insights/the-...
Which is vanishingly unlikely for almost all routes. A proper premium F or J experience that takes a few more hours is going to be a better deal for most people than a Y-like experience that shaves some hours off, like Concorde was. For a similar parallel, look at luxury travel. Private for the short hops, but the premium cabins on premium carriers are the better experience for longer journeys unless you're one of the truly tiny number of people flying a G6.
I’m pretty plugged in to aviation news and I had to look up what you were talking about. That seems like an odd thing to be excited about along with Boom. Do they have any kind of prototype yet? I don’t see any major stories about them since 2025.
How exactly? Purely on a tech basis? Because it's not solving a real problem anyone has. Some millionaire who wants to go from NYC to LA a couple hours faster is not a problem worth solving. And certainly not when it's less efficient, and inconveniences everyone in the flight path with a very loud noise.
Faster travel time makes a lot of places feel much closer together, which I think is generally a good thing.
Supersonic flight is one example, rockets are another. Neither are commercially viable… yet. But people get excited about technology like this because these investments are required for it to be possible in the future.
Saying it’s not a problem worth solving is ridiculous. You’re suggesting that humanity is never and should never get faster at traveling between point A and point B. But many places on the planet are still very far apart.
A few weeks of war in Iran showed us the impact of reduced availability of oil. The rise in the number of amplitude of climate events show us that a lot of what we do is not sustainable.
Even disregarding climate impact (which we shouldn’t) it seems like supersonic flight is just the wrong direction to be going in. If the commercial aviation industry is to survive beyond a century or two they probably need to find a different energy source for planes.
Also, it’s just not like the train to plane transition where passengers experienced 5-10x average speed improvements. The maximum amount of time you can save for a round trip flight is about a day. There’s just a limit to how much value that has. Business travelers can work on the plane, leisure travelers can just take another day off.
I mean, speaking of trains, flights sometimes gave a hard time competing with those, too. There are a lot of situations where going a little slower isn’t a problem.
You say you can’t easily travel to visit family on the other side of the country for a weekend because it takes a full day to travel, but that’s not strictly true because red eye flights exist. You can just fly during sleeping time and sleep.
It’s just not really worth it because a subsonic jet is already going so fast. It’s not like the train to plane transition where a 50 hour train ride (California Zephyr) turns into a 5 hour flight.
The longest commercial flight is about 20 hours long. Cutting off half of that, yeah, saving a day for a round trip is nice, but still a very limited benefit by comparison, especially when you consider the sleep schedule. When you remove “time you have to sleep anyway” it makes the time savings less impactful.
And as far as comfort sleeping on a plane…I guarantee you a lie flat seat on a subsonic jet is always going to cost less than an economy seat on a supersonic jet.
How long are we going to keep running up this hamster wheel instead of being satisfied with what we have?
Actually, we don't have to imagine, they got outcompeted and went extinct.
And instead of moving or being slightly more careful with your vacation planning, you’re going to do exactly what you want, on the backs of everyone else who has to absorb the negative externalities.
It's not more viable now wealth inequality just means that there are more rich people to benefit.
You could have used the exact same argument for normal flight 100 years ago. Supersonic flight being more expensive than normal flight doesn't mean it will always be too expensive for the masses unless you assume there'll be no more economic growth ever.
The low-volume, high-priced rich-person toys (Roadster) finance the scaling up that enables lower-priced mass-manufactured product (Model 3).
Eventually, that means that there will be some seats in the back of the regular plans for everyday wage slaves.
You must not have a neighbor with a car whose alarm constantly goes off at random points throughout the day right outside your window. You eventually don't notice it. Speaking from experience
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/health-impa...
On getting used to it, people adapt in that they stop consciously noticing the noise, but it's still constantly processed and grinding on one's environmental awareness.
Sorry can you explain more? It's just the definition of dB (?)
And it's less impulsive than you imagine, go to youtube to listen to the sonic boom + continuous roar.
The FAA has no criteria about the "texture" of the sound and there is no reason to believe the allowed planes will differ substantially in this respect compared to every other supersonic aircraft in the past.
Oh! Really?
So I'm not really seeing how that's an argument that people not wearing earpro would be fine with regular 108 dB booms over where they live/work. People aren't happy even about small engine noise and rightfully so, and it's one of a few core reasons for switching to electric.
I guess we'll get used to it if that kind of things becomes routine? I'm not sure.
> Military gets away with things that private industry doesn't.
For good reason. You cannot train for hedgehopping to avoid radar detection without flying low with firewalled throttles.
The lower the plane flies the fewer people end up hearing the boom. The denser air also requires an absurd amount of fuel to fly through. Commercially uneconomical. Even the military only uses low level supersonic for a last dash to the target.
I am more anti-(manufactured)-war than most, but these sights were the stuff of goosebumps (the good kind).
I'm not sure how the sonic booms of fighter jets compare to passenger planes, though.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/ARM-260115-001_Supersonic_NPRM_...
... also alludes to new designs where the boom doesn't reach the ground. It also talks about primary and secondary booms.
Will folks with these planes eliminate risk of going > .11 psf by having the boom stay off the surface?
I do think this is ridiculously anti-social. Sonic booms are incredibly disruptive. This might be better, perhaps, but all odds are on this still shaking your house pretty significantly when it goes overhead.
Source? Here’s anectodal evidence from someone who experienced this first hand and describes it very differently from “omg so antisocial, it’ll be so loud”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48741654#48742029
Having your whole house shake a couple times a day seems not ideal. The fighter jets I've heard were one of the most visceral full body experiences I've ever felt, all reality vibrating from the impact of the boom.
I could be wrong but it seems so so so probable that this is going to make the world quite a lot worse.
Can someone like Boeing or Airbus live off that indefinitely, instead of ye olde passenger jet production?
"With normal steerage air travel becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average person"
I am 47 and during my lifetime, air travel has moved from the "quite a luxury, plenty of people never experience this" to "you may pay more for the taxi to the airport, a poke bowl at the airport and the taxi in your destination than for the ticket as such" category. Capacity of airports has become a significant bottleneck, because everyone flies.
That's Europe, though, we have a lot of budget airlines there such as Ryanair.
I think staff at the agencies as well as industry staff are very passionate about what they do in their respective domains, and even with the agency heads being industry plans or uncredentialed susceptible to regulatory capture, I still think I can appreciate the willingness to revisit old prohibitions in combination with modern advances.
NASA only this past month finally did a supersonic flight with their development vehicle
they don't even have data/results yet for the "thunk" test
that's a decade away from commercial success
average person won't even be able to afford a supersonic flight
this administration is beyond bizarre, even when they aren't being destructive they are just wasting everyone's time/money
> The newly proposed rule would replace the 53-year prohibition with an interim “noise-based” certification standard requiring any sonic boom overpressure at the surface to be kept below 0.11 pounds per square foot. That proposed standard is based on the Colorado-based startup Boom Supersonic having demonstrated quiet Mach cutoff flights with its XB-1 aircraft—harnessing specific atmospheric conditions while flying just beyond supersonic speeds at higher altitudes so that the aircraft’s shockwaves are refracted upward into the atmosphere rather than traveling to the ground
I've got a question about that approach. It depends on temperature gradients in the atmosphere to refract the boom away from the ground. In their test flights that demonstrated that this worked they depended on being able to predict when and where the atmospheric conditions would be right for this.
Are such conditions common enough and stable enough both in time and space so that this could actually work in regular scheduled commercial service?
There has been some criticism of basing the standard on overpressure:
> However, not everyone is sold on this proposed standard for allowing overland supersonic flights. Dan Rutherford, senior director at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation, told Aviation Week that the overpressure metric was previously discarded by United Nations experts in 2014 because “it doesn’t actually measure loudness or annoyance.”
NASA's work on this has been using perceived sound levels to evaluate annoyance on the ground instead of overpressure:
> Meanwhile, NASA has been testing a different approach to quieter supersonic flight with the Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst—a needle-nosed experimental aircraft with an airframe designed to reduce the typical sonic boom to a sonic thump. NASA has relied on perceived levels of decibels (PldB) to evaluate sound levels, with the goal of consistently demonstrating sonic thumps around 75 PldB that would sound like a car door slamming about 20 feet away.
There is a bill [2] in Congress that has passed the House:
> US lawmakers in Congress have also been pushing forward the Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act. That would require the FAA to allow for overland supersonic flights “so long as the aircraft is operated in such a manner that no sonic boom reaches the ground in the United States.” The bill passed the House on March 24, 2026, and is still awaiting a vote in the Senate.
The bill is short (3 paragraphs) and doesn't say what it means for no sonic boom to reach the ground. The Boom approach of making use of the Mach cutoff would almost surely qualify. Would the X-59 approach where it is a "sonic thump" rather than a "sonic boom" qualify?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/faa-proposal-superso...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3410...
> Several U.S. companies are working on a new generation of luxurious supersonic passenger aircraft with much quieter sonic booms and improved fuel efficiency
The 108 dB sonic boom will be experienced over a much larger area.
There is a tonne of progress in atmospheric modellingn that lets us predict how the thump will be refracted to and reflected from the ground. So yes, you still have the same energy being dumped into the atmosphere. But less of it turns into audible sound, less of it arrives in one go, and less of it ever reaches the ground in an audible form.
I wonder what our ancestors did, lets say 500 years back. Did they have wildfires? Skiing?
I get the point about humans causing unprecedented harm to the planet. However, the examples themselves are not perfect. I know skiing may be age old, but not as an activity enjoyed by millions, and the fact we build ski resorts may be contributing to some bad things, no?
Of course that's the theory. The Trump Admin just allowed for a fairly audible boom.
https://boomsupersonic.com/boomless-cruise
And from the top of their wikipedia page:
"is expected to reach supersonic speeds without causing a sonic boom at ground level by taking advantage of a physics phenomenon known as mach cutoff"
It's not the hearing damage, it's the psychological stress.
The people defending this don't seem to know what a sonic boom is like. Even if you diffuse it some, it's a ridiculous force. These are huge jets. This is going to be a new ambient disruption that makes every single day worse, filling the world with din, every day, for possibly billions of people.
This is such a downgrade to the world. While the ultra-rich Tiphares style look down on the world.
These things are indeed "The Devil's Hairdryer"
Great memories.
Maybe perhaps possibly, but this is not my experience at all, ever.
Even if you are sensitive and impacted, even if someone buys a particularly shrill one: I can sit indoors and hear gas leaf blowing from blocks away. At least the disturbance you are hearing is localized.
https://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-...
Given those stats, Gemini says about 8 leafblowers is the same continuous CO emissions as a private jet in flight.
If it was your slave doing the leafblowing then I am sure it would be music to your ears. You could imagine your place to be Mar-a-Lago. You would also have people washing your many cars at an absurdly early hour, so they looked shiny and leaf-blown.
Your problem is having a poverty mindset. If you had a billionaire mindset then you would see that noise to utility ratio very differently, it would be proof that you had so much money.
I wish I was joking, however, I have had bosses lord it over me where leaf blowing and car polishing is what matters most to them.
On a site like HN this kind of progress should be praised not denigrated as antisocial.
Starting with the high end where there’s demand and revenues to justify R&D generally eventually filters out to enrich everyone because that’s fundamentally a larger market to go after. There’s a million problems these supersonic aircraft will have to solve so even if supersonic travel never becomes affordable, other inventions still move things forward. Case in point: the space race and race to the moon - so many technology booms in the 60s-90s because of fundamental R&D done in service of tech that had nothing to do with daily life.
1. Better, real-time atmospheric data that allows use of boom-refraction flight profiles to prevent the boom reaching the ground. This is a trick that Concorde sometimes used when conditions were right, but only works up to about Mach 1.2. This is what Boom used for quieter flights.
2. Crazy 1950s-style airframe shaping with the X-59 that reduces boom but is impractical for an actual commercial transport. This is intended to establish a baseline for tolerable routine boom intensity, but we don't yet know how to make a commercial airframe with the same quietness.
Nothing is really new.
This definitely feels like a Time Machine Morlock/Eloi, Battle Angle Alita Tiphares, Neuromancer Freeside situation, of the extreme rich untouchably far far overhead dumping endless waste noise pollution and din down onto the earth.
This administration in particular seems to absolutely not give a rat about anyone but the ultra-rich or the brownshirted anti-social and I have no confidence they are doing this based on any form of reasoned or sensible approach. This is an administration whose modus operandi is to roll coal, drill everything, cancel every green energy project (by spending billions if they have to buy out the already underway installations), go to war against vaccines/mRNA, etc etc. There's no baseline upon which to expect reasonable or smart or safe.