alt Hacker NewsSupersonic flight returning to US after half-century ban
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0.11 pound per square foot is what is being proposed. That's 108 decibels. Which is between standing next to a lawn mower and standing next to a car horn. I don't see how anyone will tolerate that in practice.
The people speaking against this seem to be being flagged. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742078
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.
This will free manufacturers to build supersonic private jets for the superwealthy to cruise over flyover America. With normal steerage air travel becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average person, I can't see airlines buying supersonic airliners given fuel costs, they couldn't fill them for what they would have to charge.
That's funny - I had no idea it was actually banned in the first place. I live near a number of large military bases and hear the fighter jets break the sound barrier on a somewhat regular basis.
On one hand I think we should applaud when regulators target the specific issue (like noise or pollution level) vs using some other metric to achieve their desired outcome. On the other hand I don’t have a ton of faith that current administration will set the targets at levels that have the general public’s interest in mind
Ars Technica has a more detailed article [1]. Here are some excerpts:
> 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...
who is rushing out the press releases with just fake news?
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
Not sure how this does anything to alter the laws of physics. But I guess it's a step in the right direction.
If sonic booms become a routine occurrence over America, I expect to see a backlash against supersonic flight unifying everyone between chemtrail conspiracy theorists and the greenpeace. The anti data center backlash we have today will look like child's play.
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If you really want to make an impact on the noise floor, ban gasoline leaf blowers.
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This is so exciting. The only ones I know working on this are Boom (unless they’ve pivoted entirely into AI DC turbines). Between this and the wind-turbine-blade air transporter it’s an exciting time for aviation. Now if we can only transition off leaded fuel!