A sonic boom shook Washington on Sunday for the saddest of reasons: Military jets had scrambled to intercept a civilian plane whose pilot was incapacitated. For many of us, that boom was a strangely familiar sound, even a welcome one.
I grew up on or near U.S. Air Force bases. Sonic booms were part of the soundscape, along with the throaty, chest-tingling roar of fighter planes. I came to like the sounds.
Not everyone did. From the start, the sonic boom — caused when a plane goes faster than the speed of sound, about 760 mph at sea level — was controversial.
What causes a sonic boom, and is it harmful?
In October of 1953, the Pentagon invited the press and public to Palmdale in Southern California to see a demonstration of the Air Force’s new F-100 Super Sabre, the first U.S. plane capable of level supersonic flight.
As a test pilot roared past the crowd, six big plate glass windows and 27 smaller panes in the airport’s administration building shattered. None of the onlookers were injured, but, reported the New York Times, some children “cried or clung to their parents.”
As the F-100 and its successors were rolled out to squadrons across the country, complaints often followed, including around Westover Air Reserve Base in Massachusetts. So did lawsuits, for damage to buildings or injury to livestock.
Though, as a Tennessee newspaper reported when supersonic jets were scheduled to arrive at a nearby base: “Some claims, Westover officials say, come from unethical attorneys who read about alleged sonic boom damages, call the victims and suggest a lawsuit against the government.”
He kissed his family goodbye. Their private plane never made it home.
The Air Force did its best to explain what sonic booms were. There was a technical explanation, of course, but also a strategic one. The sonic boom was the price we paid for progress. If we wanted our fighters to catch Soviet bombers or our bombers to high-tail it to Russia, it was going to get loud.
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In those Cold War days, this justification usually worked. One paper quoted a local politician from Madison, Wis., who had a change of heart after military officials explained why aircrews needed to train at supersonic speeds.
“Now when a plane awakens me,” he said, “I lie there and say a little prayer, first, to thank God that there is a youngster up there in that jet watching out for me. Second, to ask that that boy and his plane will get safely back to the field.
“Then, with no trouble at all, I turn over and go right back to sleep,” he said.
Sonic booms were, as the saying went, the sound of freedom.
This attitude didn’t always prevail. A month after that story ran, this headline appeared in The Washington Post: “AF Says ‘Sonic Boom’ Can Peril Civilians.”
An interim report from the Air Research and Development Command explored all aspects of sonic booms, including their possible use as weapons. They wouldn’t be much use high up in the air or against other planes, the report noted, but they might work as a weapon at altitudes of 100 to 200 feet. Jets breaking Mach 1 at that height could cause physiological and psychological effects.
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Noted the report: “From some of the reporting of boom effects, it appears that there is a tendency to panic if the source of the sound is unknown or not recognized.”
By 1960, the military had promised not to go supersonic at low altitudes or above populated areas. But for those opposed to jet noise, the battle soon moved to another threat: civilian airplanes. U.S. companies were racing to develop a supersonic transport, or SST. An SST passenger jet could cut transcontinental and transoceanic flight times in half.
In 1967, a Harvard University physicist named William Shurcliff founded the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. “Just as the only way to get rid of the smell of the skunk is to eliminate the skunk, we propose to attack the sonic boom by eliminating the SST,” Shurcliff told the New York Times.
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In 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration banned supersonic commercial flights over land because of sonic booms — a prohibition that remains in effect today.
Back in the 1950s, The Post’s defense reporter was John G. Norris. He wrote a lot about sonic booms, and in August of 1957 he had a chance to go supersonic himself. A test pilot from North American Aviation took him up in an F-100, breaking the sound barrier multiple times high above the Chesapeake Bay.
Norris noted an irony: The one place you won’t hear a sonic boom is inside the plane that makes it.
