They are not looking for the ability to cause sonic booms, they are looking allow supersonic planes that don’t produce the concussive booms. > In the airline i

They are not looking for the ability to cause sonic booms, they are looking allow supersonic planes that don’t produce the concussive booms. > In the airline industry’s current tube-and-wings model, shock waves largely roll off and then meld into a sonic boom. The aerodynamic X-plane, however, is designed to scatter multiple shock waves and minimize their cumulative effect, producing only a rumble or soft thump. [1] > Acoustic engineers have developed a system for measuring sonic booms, called perceived levels of decibels, or PLdB. A decibel (dB) is a measure of pressure; PLdB is what people actually hear. When the Concorde airliner went supersonic, its window-rattling booms scored a PLdB rating of 102, equivalent, for a split second, to the high whine of a fighter engine just feet away. Those are the booms that inspired the original FAA ban. The X-59 has been designed to achieve a PLdB of 75, similar to what might be heard when standing next to a heavily trafficked road. (The numeric drop is larger than it might seem; the decibel scale is logarithmic.) In more conventional units, the Concorde’s supersonic sound waves carried a powerful maximum atmospheric overpressure of two pounds per square foot. By contrast, the X-59’s would exert 0.3 pounds per square foot on the eardrum. [2] [1] https://www.nasa.gov/aero/nasa-prepares-to-go-public-with-quiet-supersonic-tech https://www.nasa.gov/aero/nasa-prepares-to-go-public-with-qu... [2] https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/lower-the-boom-180971750/ https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/lower-the-boom-1809...