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Well I am old enough to remember the Sonic Booms. We would get a warning in the local newspaper (sometimes) and as kids we will watch outside waiting for the b
by jmclnx 4y ago
Well I am old enough to remember the Sonic Booms. We would get a warning in the local newspaper (sometimes) and as kids we will watch outside waiting for the boom and try and find the plane. We lived fairly close to a base that would test these planes.
But, some people's windows would crack and some would break due to the boom, which they had to pay for. So, if this limit is changed, will the aircraft owners pay people for their broken windows.
Back then seeing a plane at any speed was not common event. Now you look up at just about any time of day and the chances are very good (like 90%+) you can find a plane.
- tpmx 4y agoCan I ask; roughly speaking, how old are you? (Or rather: when was this?)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smolder 4y agoThis is pretty easy to deduce given GP was a kid in the time leading up to the 1973 rule.
- lambdaba 4y ago[flagged]
- tiedieconderoga 4y agoOof. I really hope we aren't moving towards a world where people start to copy/paste verbose AI-generated paragraphs without checking the results. Especially not to answer simple questions like, "about how old is someone who was a child 50+ years ago?" The AI's guess is off by about a decade. If GP remembers multiple booms, they were probably at least 10 by the 1973 ban. Most people can't recall memories back to the moment of their birth, but LLMs often ignore nuanced contextual facts like that. Or maybe this is another case of the model living a few years in the past, since there's a lag in being trained on new data. Who knows, but I am troubled that its incorrect answer was so readily accepted. This is not an important question, but it would have been easy to double-check. This comment may be a grim portent of things to come, if people continue to trust these models so implicitly.
- jmclnx 4y agoAs someone said I am a "sonic boomer" :)
- tpmx 4y agoThanks! :)
- davidw 4y agoI don't really care much one way or the other, but the article does address this. The actual externality is the noise/pressure wave, not the speed. It makes sense to regulate as close to externalities as possible, rather than banning sort of related upstream things. In other words, if they can do supersonic without booms that cause problems, go for it. If they're unable to, well, then they keep flying so as to not produce them.
- wrigby 4y agoI can only assume you’re being downvoted because folks are thinking that you can’t go supersonic without making a boom. While this may be true, it doesn’t change the fact that you make a good point - regulation should be made as close to externalities as possible. If it makes the upstream thing impossible, then fine, but let’s actually regulate what we want to regulate.
- Y_Y 4y agoWhat an unusually sane point.
- jmclnx 4y agoI saw that, I find that hard to believe unless they are flying extremely high. I think height was also mentioned. But doesn't flying that high damage the ozone or something ? I thought that was one of the many reasons the concord was stopped (Yes, I know the real reason was financial). If so, many planes flying that high could cause other issues. But some people will see if this happens.
- davidw 4y ago> But doesn't flying that high damage the ozone or something Well, then add that to the list of things that are prohibited, I guess and let them see if they can make it work. Regulate the things we actually don't want, rather than the adjacent things.
- wingspar 4y agoYes. Experienced numerous Space Shuttle sonic booms. For me they weren’t problematic like broken windows. But would wake you up. I also remember waiting for the sonic boom from Columbia, which never came..
- brycewray 4y agoAm in north Texas. That morning, I was watching NASA TV’s coverage of what should’ve been the mission’s safe ending, and heard multiple sonic booms, closely spaced. This was soon after Houston had lost comms with Columbia following the warnings about weird sensor readings, and I said to myself, “That’s weird. That sounds like what a shuttle does when it’s—” . . . and then I stopped, as I slowly began to realize there might be a terrible reason why Houston had lost contact.
- Procrastes 4y agoMy wife used to live on Edward's Air Force Base which has been a reserved sonic boom corridor all along. Just some learnings for that lifestyle. Don't keep fragile things on narrow shelves and you have to glue the bottom of every picture to the wall. Don't have dogs or get them a xanax prescription. Cat's don't care. It's not (always) an earthquake when the glass rattles. And you get used to all of it.
- Y_Y 4y agoOk, sonic boomer
- drpixie 4y agoImagine trying to get compensation for your broken windows from Elon Musk!