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NASA is showering one city with sonic booms and hoping no one notices
NASA has been deliberately creating sonic booms off the coast of Galveston, Texas, since Monday in the hope that residents on the barrier island community won't be too bothered by the sound of an F/A-18 aircraft briefly going supersonic.
That's because the research jet is performing a dive maneuver designed to reduce the normally thunderous sonic boom to what NASA calls a "quiet thump," more like the sound of a car door slamming.
The test flights are aimed at measuring the community response to the new, quieter booms and are part of NASA's larger effort to develop a new, more muted supersonic plane that might be able to fly over land.
Previously: NASA Quesst Project - Quiet Supersonic Transport
Concorde Without the Cacophony: NASA Thinks It's Cracked Quiet Supersonic Flight
NASA Tests Light, Foldable Plane Wings for Supersonic Flights
Trump Administration Supports NASA's Quieter Supersonic Plane Design
NASA Awards Quiet Supersonic Aircraft Contract to Lockheed Martin
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday November 08 2018, @10:22AM (4 children)
On Banner Mountain, in the Sierra Nevadas near Grass Valley - RLY - and Nevada City, which I always found puzzling was in California.
I figure the USAF, USN and USMC figured the mountains were so quiet that their residents would actually _appreciate_ the sound of a sonic boom.
Mom told me the ear-shattering - if not actually _window_ shattering noise - was a "sonic boom", and that it occurs when an airplane goes faster than sound.
At five years old I had no clue what she was talking about, but also at five years old, I thought sonic booms were quite cool. It greatly saddened me years later that the Concorde was permitted to break the sound barrier only over the ocean.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 08 2018, @02:42PM
What would be the point of calling it Nevada City, if it were in Nevada? It'd be like calling New York City, "New York City". We already know how that turned out.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Thursday November 08 2018, @03:33PM (1 child)
Like you, I'm old enough to remember sonic booms. The small Missouri town in which I spent my early childhood was not far from an air force base. I remember the first time I heard a sonic boom. I was in the front yard observing honey bees gathering pollen from the dandelions. It was a warm, sunny day without a cloud in the sky. Then suddenly, WHAM! It scared the daylights out of me. I ran inside the house calling for my mother. "It's okay," she said, "It's just a sonic boom. The fighter jets do that when they fly really fast." I instantly went from being scared to thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. :-)
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Saturday November 10 2018, @10:16AM
Yeah, I remember sonic booms from military jets when I was a kid. I thought they were cool too.
Though they did sometimes do it flying so low it rattled the windows and knocked VHS tapes off the shelf.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @01:41PM
Back in those days there was a shitload of bases along the Sierras. Given your location a lot of them were probably SR-71s, F-111s, F-4s, or later F-16s.
Nowadays it is all commercial jets roaring out, except for Beale, which is mostly drone traffic now.