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!
that seems very unlikely. margins are already quite thin, and the airlines are making most of their money with the higher fare tiers. if you remove some of those customers, then its entirely possible that the base fare will increase in response.
Exactly. Now they even make decisions on which routes to offer based on how likely they are to attract customers who use their branded credit cards. The analytics around this are quite sophisticated.
Not particularly knowledgable about this, but I was under the impression the front of the bus subsidizes the back. So if the front opts for more expensive supersonic flights then the back will have to increase in cost to make it profitable to fly subsonic flights at all.
Economy and business seem to be on the same total sum level for revenue.
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.
Why? They already have price pressure due to some people not having enough money. If the people currently flying business class all move to SSTs, won't the airlines now have to charge more for coach seats fitted in their place because they were previously making much more profit per square area from business passengers?
> If the people currently flying business class all move to SSTs
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.
Assuming Boom or someone else makes it, it's potentially interesting if you routinely fly business/first class today. Which is thousands of dollars for trans-oceanic flights. So, yeah, if you're looking for bargain economy fares this likely won't ever be for you.
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.
Not immediately. But small changes add up over a long period. Air travel is currently hard limited by the sound barrier & fuel efficiency. I can’t easily visit my family on the other side of the country for a weekend because it takes a full day to travel.
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.
Don't want to be a downer and I fly regularly myself, but I think right now Air Travel is limited by 1 thing: the supply of carbon neutral fuel.
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.
Is there a good estimation of how long the world has left of actual commercially viable oil that can be refined into jet fuel?
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.
Given the state of our global climate that it’s orders of magnitude more important to tackle aviations fuel efficiency and emissions than figuring out how to make supersonic travel commercially viable.
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.
Isn't it already ridiculous that we can get to the other side of the world in half a day? It used to be straight up impossible, and then it took months by boat. We're now at diminishing returns, saving a couple of hours.
How long are we going to keep running up this hamster wheel instead of being satisfied with what we have?
> I can’t easily visit my family on the other side of the country for a weekend
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.
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.
There is a substantial noise beyond the initial boom which is very loud even relative to the main boom. But even just a half second of a car horn going off right next to you every so often is intolerable.
You have to start somewhere before you can build towards an economy of scale that makes it affordable. If people used your same logic about regular airplanes, we wouldn't be using them today.
Supersonic flight will never be suitable for the masses compared to normal flight due to basic physics. It will always require much more expensive planes and more fuel.
It's not more viable now wealth inequality just means that there are more rich people to benefit.
>Supersonic flight will never be suitable for the masses compared to normal flight due to basic physics. It will always require much more expensive planes and more fuel.
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.
Relatively, absolutely, but look at computers. Yes, more computing still costs more than less computing. Physics hasn't changed, but the cost of computers has. I have, in my hand, for part of a couple months of middle class wages, more computing power than existed in the world in 1960.
I'm still waiting for Tesla's plan to come true where the rich paid for development before scaling up brings the prices down. The luxury economy of scale is about as realistic trickle down economy
Get those rich people out of the private jets and into the supersonic ones. Then the rich people currently in first class can move into the private jets.
Eventually, that means that there will be some seats in the back of the regular plans for everyday wage slaves.
Its not clear why you would think any of this works this way. Not one thing you said makes sense it's like a weird trickle down economics for flights as if better steaks would get oliver twist more gruel
Food is different from airplanes. On a middle class salary, I could afford to take a flight from Atlanta to Liberia and back for $300. Or $250 to get to Vegas and back. Spirit recently went out of business, but in 100 years I bet supersonic jet travel will be available to the middle class.
I disagree. The more that I travel, the more that I notice the trend: The richer you become, the quieter you become. Even in the same country, income level seems to strongly correlate with how loud you are in public (and private).
> But even just a half second of a car horn going off right next to you every so often is intolerable.
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
Depends on the frequency and duration. Lived near some tracks for years and what got me was waking up in the middle of the night for that freight train that was irregular. The regular passenger train I got used to though.
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.
I actually do, and I still notice it every time. Some asshole across the street rides a motorcycle and every day he revs his motorcycle which sets off the alarm of some other asshole's van.
It’s not accurate to convert .1 psf to dB because it’s an impulsive shape, not a continuous tone. And human loudness perception depends on how smooth (low frequency) the shape is
> It’s not accurate to convert .1 psf to dB because it’s an impulsive shape, not a continuous tone. And human loudness perception depends on how smooth (low frequency) the shape is
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.
On a typical day, the atmospheric pressure varies by maybe 150 Pa, or 3 psf. By definition, that’s 137 dB. But it’s imperceptible because the rate of change is so low.
Obviously it is assumed we are talking about frequencies in the range of the audio spectrum (which a sonic boom is). Your point has nothing to do with the dB scale.
Yeah nah. For all relevant level metering you use a A-weighting curve (weighting the frequencies by human ear sensitivity) so that is not how any of that works.
...yes, really? Gun fire is indeed stupendously, dangerously loud, which is why we have suppressors and heavy hearing protection for them. And there are indeed significant public/legal fights around outdoor gun ranges that end up near habitation (even if it's not the range's fault at all but rather because construction moved towards it).
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.
My only experience with a sonic boom was in D.C. a few years ago when fighters were scrambled to intercept a learjet which had depressurized and everyone onboard was unconscious. I believe it ultimately crashed somewhere in VA or WV. Anyway, my windows were open and the "blast" was startlingly loud, but not like a detonation. More of a gentler push like a large fireworks explosion. It was both a loud sound and a pressure wave sufficient to move the curtains in the windows. There were emergency services responding all over the city looking for the source of an explosion.
I guess we'll get used to it if that kind of things becomes routine? I'm not sure.
My guessing from the couch would be they were further away than you might have thought. I was up in the mountains when a couple of fighters flew close with a boom, and it was one of the loudest things I have experienced.
Back in the 1960s (!) the military would fly supersonic over the town I lived in. I always enjoyed the boom. I would also open the window during a thunderstorm or go sit on the porch because I enjoyed the incredible electric display and the booms.
Military gets away with things that private industry doesn't. Supersonic passenger planes would be flying every day on a schedule, far far more than military. Commercial planes are also rated for far more flight hours.
Overland private supersonic travel should not happen, it would just be a massive unpriced negative externality.
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.
When Boom was testing last year, the sonic boom never reached the ground, as I recall. That can be arranged at higher altitudes, but doesn't work at low ones.
That's only possible under specific climatic conditions where there's separate temperature/pressure layers. Which is why they asked to repeal the ban on supersonic flight over populated areas. If they actually thought it wouldn't make noise they wouldn't be asking for the rule to be changed.
They didn't ask for only a non audible change, because they know that it will not be. It's just marketing and misdirection because the truth is much less rosy.
Memories of a kid on a road trip...Interceptors taking off low, at full afterburners, in the dark of the night, screaming across the highway, for their practice sorties...
I am more anti-(manufactured)-war than most, but these sights were the stuff of goosebumps (the good kind).
Back in the 80's the British air force would fly ridiculously low over the rural village I grew up in, certainly lower than they were meant to be allowed to - everyone hated it. You'd be minding your own business and then just about shit yourself out of nowhere!
Yeah, I often have military flight training over my town, and I don't find the sonic booms particularly bad. I barely notice the planes unless they fly close to the ground over my house.
I'm not sure how the sonic booms of fighter jets compare to passenger planes, though.
I can't stand military jets over my neighborhood. I get irrationally angry every time I'm walking somewhere with my wife and we both have to completely stop talking for two blocks because some F-14 is blasting around over our heads. They are just unbelievably loud.
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.
It still sounds like what I know of from sonic booms, a very pronounced hard thump. On a small model.
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.
I’m not seeing any real arguments in those comments. They shouldn’t be flagged. But they’re fine being downvoted for being reflexively, substancelessly critical in a cliched way.
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.
How big is the market of supersonic private jets for the superwealthy?
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'm not sure what a ticket for me from Boston to NYC would be these days as I essentially always take the train. But airline tickets in the US have been hundreds of dollars in my experience as is my transportation to and from the airport. To say nothing of hotels in major cities being hundreds of dollars per day--and that's not anything especially fancy. But, yes, air travel is cheaper in current dollars than it used to be.
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.
Are you sure you're actually hearing sonic booms? The low-bypass turbofan engines used on most current tactical aircraft are quite loud even in subsonic flight. F-35 and F/A-18 fighters overfly my house occasionally and while I don't mind the noise they're definitely much louder than airliners. They generally only go supersonic over designated training ranges away from heavily populated areas.
I live along the coast. They’ll routinely go supersonic too near to shore and violate their own standards. Nothing ever comes of it. Just part of life.
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
I kind of do have that faith. Sean Duffy's reality TV career hasn't really hampered the transportation agencies
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.
They simply mention that the sonic boom will be less than it has been. It seems obvious the current admin is just stripping away regulation that harms the billionaire class.
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?
The title of the article is misleading, there will still be booms:
> Several U.S. companies are working on a new generation of luxurious supersonic passenger aircraft with much quieter sonic booms and improved fuel efficiency
If that loud sound is roughly boom-like in shape and texture, and caused by an object moving faster through its medium than the speed of sound of its medium, then they are, in fact, the same thing.
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.
108 dB is the proposed FAA allowable pressure at the surface of the earth. They didn't come up with this number arbitrarily they did it with consultation with the supersonic plane companies and if those companies could achieve much less than 108dB then the proposed limit would be lower.
I lived in the area where boom did their flight tests and the local news would announce days when they were testing. FWIW, I think they used scaled down aircraft so production aircraft may vary, but the boom was more of a thump. It comes on quick though, so some potential for startling, not on account of volume so much as sonic attack.
> no more skiing, endless smoke inhalation from wildfires, etc.
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?
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.
The initial boom is less than a second but it's like standing right next to the leafblower (not across the street) and is accompanied a lasting thundering-noise which is also extremely loud.
Yeah, and it's entirely unexpected. Just, out of the blue, boom. A deep shaking sound wave blasts you.
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.
I was 100% in your camp until my neighbor bought an electric blower. The loud, high pitched whine is somehow louder and more ear piercing than a gas blower.
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.
But imagine if you were fantastically rich and you could pay people to do leaf blower things at the crack of dawn. That would be true luxury, bossing around 'little people' that depend on you for a job waving around a leaf blower, or else they will starve, and die.
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.
As I understand it the noise pollution stuff is due to really old tech. The new stuff should be much better performing to basically eliminate the sonic boom and the regulatory changes are reflecting that.
On a site like HN this kind of progress should be praised not denigrated as antisocial.
It's reflective of the gradual dawning that while technology is amazing and exciting and can help people, under current systems it's more likely to be used to benefit the thousand or so richest people in the world and fuck everyone else over. Could we make supersonic jets more quiet and less disruptive? Yeah, probably. But why would a single cent be spent on that? The people flying in them don't give a single shit. They would only get quieter as a side effect of an improvement that somehow increases return.
Because it’s not up to them. Look at Tesla: started with an overpriced roadster to sell to rich people and ended up with a budget electric car.
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.
Here’s an example of a life saving application you could imagine being enabled: there’s a huge problem with getting organ donors’ organs to meet supply where demand is (why there’s state level registries instead of a national one). If there’s constantly these jets buzzing about, you could imagine regulations that require them to aid emergency personnel transporting organs when such transports come up - it’s not like you’re transporting anything big / you don’t actually need to transport people - just make sure every flight can appropriately have it attached and then you toss it on when it needs to go somewhere better than is available in the local vicinity (and heavy fines and pilots losing licenses if they detour from their declared destination).
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.
I'm just very very skeptical I'm going to be able to sit inside or sit on the porch and not know it's going overhead. Which I can do with most planes today. I've only heard a couple supersonic booms in my life & they are incredible & ridiculously disruptive events, in a whole body sort of way that is without compare, even if I'm deep inside a heavy massive brick building.
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.
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!
Also NASA / Lockheed Martin https://www.nasa.gov/mission/quesst/
Why is this an exciting time for aviation? Or more specifically, why should I (a person who never spends more than $2,000 on air travel) be excited?
Increased adoption will put price pressure on traditional flights making them more affordable
that seems very unlikely. margins are already quite thin, and the airlines are making most of their money with the higher fare tiers. if you remove some of those customers, then its entirely possible that the base fare will increase in response.
This big airlines in the US loose money overall operating flights. They make it up on loyalty programs and credit cards.
Exactly. Now they even make decisions on which routes to offer based on how likely they are to attract customers who use their branded credit cards. The analytics around this are quite sophisticated.
Not particularly knowledgable about this, but I was under the impression the front of the bus subsidizes the back. So if the front opts for more expensive supersonic flights then the back will have to increase in cost to make it profitable to fly subsonic flights at all.
Economy and business seem to be on the same total sum level for revenue.
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-...
Why? They already have price pressure due to some people not having enough money. If the people currently flying business class all move to SSTs, won't the airlines now have to charge more for coach seats fitted in their place because they were previously making much more profit per square area from business passengers?
> If the people currently flying business class all move to SSTs
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.
Assuming Boom or someone else makes it, it's potentially interesting if you routinely fly business/first class today. Which is thousands of dollars for trans-oceanic flights. So, yeah, if you're looking for bargain economy fares this likely won't ever be for you.
Because I can get somewhere faster for the same price over time.
Are you talking about Windrunner?
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.
> This is so exciting.
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.
Not immediately. But small changes add up over a long period. Air travel is currently hard limited by the sound barrier & fuel efficiency. I can’t easily visit my family on the other side of the country for a weekend because it takes a full day to travel.
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.
Don't want to be a downer and I fly regularly myself, but I think right now Air Travel is limited by 1 thing: the supply of carbon neutral fuel.
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.
Is there a good estimation of how long the world has left of actual commercially viable oil that can be refined into jet fuel?
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.
Given the state of our global climate that it’s orders of magnitude more important to tackle aviations fuel efficiency and emissions than figuring out how to make supersonic travel commercially viable.
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.
Isn't it already ridiculous that we can get to the other side of the world in half a day? It used to be straight up impossible, and then it took months by boat. We're now at diminishing returns, saving a couple of hours.
How long are we going to keep running up this hamster wheel instead of being satisfied with what we have?
> I can’t easily visit my family on the other side of the country for a weekend
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.
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.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/db
Because it's not continuous sound in one spot like a leaf blower is.
There is a substantial noise beyond the initial boom which is very loud even relative to the main boom. But even just a half second of a car horn going off right next to you every so often is intolerable.
People finding a way to tolerate what was previously considered intolerable is pretty much the story of civilization.
I'd argue that civilization is the story of people finding ways to overcome what they previously had to tolerate.
If supersonic flight is so expensive that less than 1% of the population can enjoy it its not clear why the rest of us ought to tolerate it
You have to start somewhere before you can build towards an economy of scale that makes it affordable. If people used your same logic about regular airplanes, we wouldn't be using them today.
Supersonic flight will never be suitable for the masses compared to normal flight due to basic physics. It will always require much more expensive planes and more fuel.
It's not more viable now wealth inequality just means that there are more rich people to benefit.
>Supersonic flight will never be suitable for the masses compared to normal flight due to basic physics. It will always require much more expensive planes and more fuel.
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.
Physics doesnt change. It will always cost more energy to fly faster.
Relatively, absolutely, but look at computers. Yes, more computing still costs more than less computing. Physics hasn't changed, but the cost of computers has. I have, in my hand, for part of a couple months of middle class wages, more computing power than existed in the world in 1960.
Yes and now wafer costs are going up for n+1 node, because of physics reasons.
There are 28 000 passenger flights in the US every day, imagine the noise under major corridors if a large percentage of them was supersonic.
What are we talking about? 5% more? 200% more?
I'm still waiting for Tesla's plan to come true where the rich paid for development before scaling up brings the prices down. The luxury economy of scale is about as realistic trickle down economy
> still waiting for Tesla's plan to come true where the rich paid for development before scaling up brings the prices down
The low-volume, high-priced rich-person toys (Roadster) finance the scaling up that enables lower-priced mass-manufactured product (Model 3).
Get those rich people out of the private jets and into the supersonic ones. Then the rich people currently in first class can move into the private jets.
Eventually, that means that there will be some seats in the back of the regular plans for everyday wage slaves.
Its not clear why you would think any of this works this way. Not one thing you said makes sense it's like a weird trickle down economics for flights as if better steaks would get oliver twist more gruel
Food is different from airplanes. On a middle class salary, I could afford to take a flight from Atlanta to Liberia and back for $300. Or $250 to get to Vegas and back. Spirit recently went out of business, but in 100 years I bet supersonic jet travel will be available to the middle class.
Liberia the African country or Liberia the city in Costa Rica?
It's worth noting that the initial supersonic bans came as a result of sustained sonic boom testing over the same population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests
I disagree. The more that I travel, the more that I notice the trend: The richer you become, the quieter you become. Even in the same country, income level seems to strongly correlate with how loud you are in public (and private).
> But even just a half second of a car horn going off right next to you every so often is intolerable.
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
live by a railroad track. takes about 6 months till you don't notice it. at all.
Depends on the frequency and duration. Lived near some tracks for years and what got me was waking up in the middle of the night for that freight train that was irregular. The regular passenger train I got used to though.
To state the obvious, it's better if it's calm:
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.
I actually do, and I still notice it every time. Some asshole across the street rides a motorcycle and every day he revs his motorcycle which sets off the alarm of some other asshole's van.
It’s not accurate to convert .1 psf to dB because it’s an impulsive shape, not a continuous tone. And human loudness perception depends on how smooth (low frequency) the shape is
> It’s not accurate to convert .1 psf to dB because it’s an impulsive shape, not a continuous tone. And human loudness perception depends on how smooth (low frequency) the shape is
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.
On a typical day, the atmospheric pressure varies by maybe 150 Pa, or 3 psf. By definition, that’s 137 dB. But it’s imperceptible because the rate of change is so low.
Obviously it is assumed we are talking about frequencies in the range of the audio spectrum (which a sonic boom is). Your point has nothing to do with the dB scale.
Yeah nah. For all relevant level metering you use a A-weighting curve (weighting the frequencies by human ear sensitivity) so that is not how any of that works.
A sonic boom doesn't exactly average out over the length of the day, though, does it?
> That's 108 decibels. > I don't see how anyone will tolerate that in practice.
Oh! Really?
https://earinc.com/gunfire-noise-level-reference-chart/
...yes, really? Gun fire is indeed stupendously, dangerously loud, which is why we have suppressors and heavy hearing protection for them. And there are indeed significant public/legal fights around outdoor gun ranges that end up near habitation (even if it's not the range's fault at all but rather because construction moved towards it).
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.
Most gunshots people hear are not right next to them and so won't be anywhere near 108 dB to them.
also, there are neighborhoods with extended amounts of gun violence and discharges and I can't say that the residents "don't mind it"
In this case they mind getting shot at by stray fire, the noise is a secondary concern.
Keeps rent down tho.
My only experience with a sonic boom was in D.C. a few years ago when fighters were scrambled to intercept a learjet which had depressurized and everyone onboard was unconscious. I believe it ultimately crashed somewhere in VA or WV. Anyway, my windows were open and the "blast" was startlingly loud, but not like a detonation. More of a gentler push like a large fireworks explosion. It was both a loud sound and a pressure wave sufficient to move the curtains in the windows. There were emergency services responding all over the city looking for the source of an explosion.
I guess we'll get used to it if that kind of things becomes routine? I'm not sure.
My guessing from the couch would be they were further away than you might have thought. I was up in the mountains when a couple of fighters flew close with a boom, and it was one of the loudest things I have experienced.
Yeah that's entirely possible, I have no idea what their actual flight path was.
You could have checked adsb exchange.
Back in the 1960s (!) the military would fly supersonic over the town I lived in. I always enjoyed the boom. I would also open the window during a thunderstorm or go sit on the porch because I enjoyed the incredible electric display and the booms.
Military gets away with things that private industry doesn't. Supersonic passenger planes would be flying every day on a schedule, far far more than military. Commercial planes are also rated for far more flight hours.
Yes, the military ones were infrequent. I'm sure it would get annoying if it was too often.
> 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.
Overland private supersonic travel should not happen, it would just be a massive unpriced negative externality.
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.
When Boom was testing last year, the sonic boom never reached the ground, as I recall. That can be arranged at higher altitudes, but doesn't work at low ones.
That's only possible under specific climatic conditions where there's separate temperature/pressure layers. Which is why they asked to repeal the ban on supersonic flight over populated areas. If they actually thought it wouldn't make noise they wouldn't be asking for the rule to be changed.
The rule bans the supersonic flight regardless of whether it's audible or not, so they'd still be asking for the rule to be changed.
They didn't ask for only a non audible change, because they know that it will not be. It's just marketing and misdirection because the truth is much less rosy.
Memories of a kid on a road trip...Interceptors taking off low, at full afterburners, in the dark of the night, screaming across the highway, for their practice sorties...
I am more anti-(manufactured)-war than most, but these sights were the stuff of goosebumps (the good kind).
The sound of freedom!
Dunno about that, but sure is a heck of an engineering feat and an audiovisual spectacle.
Back in the 80's the British air force would fly ridiculously low over the rural village I grew up in, certainly lower than they were meant to be allowed to - everyone hated it. You'd be minding your own business and then just about shit yourself out of nowhere!
I find it so bizarre that anyone would be upset about this instead of thankful for the protection.
Yeah, I often have military flight training over my town, and I don't find the sonic booms particularly bad. I barely notice the planes unless they fly close to the ground over my house.
I'm not sure how the sonic booms of fighter jets compare to passenger planes, though.
I can't stand military jets over my neighborhood. I get irrationally angry every time I'm walking somewhere with my wife and we both have to completely stop talking for two blocks because some F-14 is blasting around over our heads. They are just unbelievably loud.
The last American F14 was retired 20 years ago.
It seems like that is the limit. the proposal:
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?
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 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
It still sounds like what I know of from sonic booms, a very pronounced hard thump. On a small model.
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.
I’m not seeing any real arguments in those comments. They shouldn’t be flagged. But they’re fine being downvoted for being reflexively, substancelessly critical in a cliched way.
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.
How big is the market of supersonic private jets for the superwealthy?
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'm not sure what a ticket for me from Boston to NYC would be these days as I essentially always take the train. But airline tickets in the US have been hundreds of dollars in my experience as is my transportation to and from the airport. To say nothing of hotels in major cities being hundreds of dollars per day--and that's not anything especially fancy. But, yes, air travel is cheaper in current dollars than it used to be.
Please cite evidence confirming your assertion that air travel is becoming increasingly unaffordable for the average person.
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.
I believe the supersonic ban is/was on civilian aircraft.
Here the military agreed to only allow booms in emergencies.
Are you sure you're actually hearing sonic booms? The low-bypass turbofan engines used on most current tactical aircraft are quite loud even in subsonic flight. F-35 and F/A-18 fighters overfly my house occasionally and while I don't mind the noise they're definitely much louder than airliners. They generally only go supersonic over designated training ranges away from heavily populated areas.
I live along the coast. They’ll routinely go supersonic too near to shore and violate their own standards. Nothing ever comes of it. Just part of life.
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
I kind of do have that faith. Sean Duffy's reality TV career hasn't really hampered the transportation agencies
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.
None of this implies any revisit will be done with the citizen in mind.
The same Sean Duffy who took a vacation paid for by the companies he regulates? (https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/13/...). I expect that guy to put enrich "Sean Duffy" as priorities #1, #2, and #3.
I think I covered all of that with my mention of regulatory capture and you were waiting for any conversation that mentions him to post that
If only the staff at the regulating agencies were there. I think they got a dose of DOGE last year.
They simply mention that the sonic boom will be less than it has been. It seems obvious the current admin is just stripping away regulation that harms the billionaire class.
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.
The title of the article is misleading, there will still be booms:
> Several U.S. companies are working on a new generation of luxurious supersonic passenger aircraft with much quieter sonic booms and improved fuel efficiency
They’re no longer sonic booms under the appropriate conditions. They still make some noise, as does, for example, high speed rail.
They are in fact the same. 108dB loud.
A sonic boom and a loud sound are not, in fact, the same thing.
If that loud sound is roughly boom-like in shape and texture, and caused by an object moving faster through its medium than the speed of sound of its medium, then they are, in fact, the same thing.
In Japan, HST noise is limited to 70-75 dB at 25 meters from the track.
The 108 dB sonic boom will be experienced over a much larger area.
> They are in fact the same. 108dB loud
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.
108 dB is the proposed FAA allowable pressure at the surface of the earth. They didn't come up with this number arbitrarily they did it with consultation with the supersonic plane companies and if those companies could achieve much less than 108dB then the proposed limit would be lower.
I lived in the area where boom did their flight tests and the local news would announce days when they were testing. FWIW, I think they used scaled down aircraft so production aircraft may vary, but the boom was more of a thump. It comes on quick though, so some potential for startling, not on account of volume so much as sonic attack.
https://www.iflscience.com/nasa-image-shows-xb-1-jet-break-t...
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Why are there multiple users with similar usernames posting hyper-negative comments?
> no more skiing, endless smoke inhalation from wildfires, etc.
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?
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Their claim is the boom won't actually reach ground level for overland flights due to how they're profiled.
Of course that's the theory. The Trump Admin just allowed for a fairly audible boom.
Where is this claim?
From the top of their corporate website, there is a video explaining this:
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Overture
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.
If you really want to make an impact on the noise floor, ban gasoline leaf blowers.
The proposed limit is around the level of standing right next to a leaf blower.
That's fine. The occasional boom, assuming business success this time, will last a few seconds. Leaf blowers last for hours in some neighborhoods.
It's not the hearing damage, it's the psychological stress.
The initial boom is less than a second but it's like standing right next to the leafblower (not across the street) and is accompanied a lasting thundering-noise which is also extremely loud.
Yeah, and it's entirely unexpected. Just, out of the blue, boom. A deep shaking sound wave blasts you.
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.
Weed wackers too
Up next is boom's line of of landscape blowers
Another use for their bespoke jet engines!
>> ban gasoline leaf blowers
These things are indeed "The Devil's Hairdryer"
Air quality, too. Leaf blowers re-suspend carcinogens like brake dust and other fine particulate matter. Honestly just an awful practice all around.
As someone who grew up near an US military base with constant low altitude aircraft noise: No thank you, I'd prefer the leaf blower any time.
As someone who lived near Luke AFB, I used to ride my bike to the flight line and watch the F104's blast off with full afterburners!
Great memories.
I was 100% in your camp until my neighbor bought an electric blower. The loud, high pitched whine is somehow louder and more ear piercing than a gas blower.
Hey, DC resident. We've banned gas leaf blowers.
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.
Gas blowers pollute which is the primary reason to ban them.
How many gas blowers do I have to run to be one Taylor Swift?
Its not many. They are stupidly innefficient.
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.
I love the idea of "one Taylor Swift" becoming a standard unit of measurement for pollution!
Not many, one or two 2-stroke leaf blowers should do the trick.
I have a special seething hatred for leafblowers. The noise to utility ratio is so high.
But imagine if you were fantastically rich and you could pay people to do leaf blower things at the crack of dawn. That would be true luxury, bossing around 'little people' that depend on you for a job waving around a leaf blower, or else they will starve, and die.
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.
go to switzerland. gas leaf blowers and jet ski's. not allowed
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As I understand it the noise pollution stuff is due to really old tech. The new stuff should be much better performing to basically eliminate the sonic boom and the regulatory changes are reflecting that.
On a site like HN this kind of progress should be praised not denigrated as antisocial.
It's reflective of the gradual dawning that while technology is amazing and exciting and can help people, under current systems it's more likely to be used to benefit the thousand or so richest people in the world and fuck everyone else over. Could we make supersonic jets more quiet and less disruptive? Yeah, probably. But why would a single cent be spent on that? The people flying in them don't give a single shit. They would only get quieter as a side effect of an improvement that somehow increases return.
Because it’s not up to them. Look at Tesla: started with an overpriced roadster to sell to rich people and ended up with a budget electric car.
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.
Here’s an example of a life saving application you could imagine being enabled: there’s a huge problem with getting organ donors’ organs to meet supply where demand is (why there’s state level registries instead of a national one). If there’s constantly these jets buzzing about, you could imagine regulations that require them to aid emergency personnel transporting organs when such transports come up - it’s not like you’re transporting anything big / you don’t actually need to transport people - just make sure every flight can appropriately have it attached and then you toss it on when it needs to go somewhere better than is available in the local vicinity (and heavy fines and pilots losing licenses if they detour from their declared destination).
Organs usually fly a short enough distance that supersonic wouldn't make a difference.
The 'new stuff' is split into two categories:
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.
I'm just very very skeptical I'm going to be able to sit inside or sit on the porch and not know it's going overhead. Which I can do with most planes today. I've only heard a couple supersonic booms in my life & they are incredible & ridiculously disruptive events, in a whole body sort of way that is without compare, even if I'm deep inside a heavy massive brick building.
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.
Is that why you flagged the parent comment for critiquing progress?