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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not really 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.
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.
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.
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?
70 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadIf 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.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/db
I guess we'll get used to it if that kind of things becomes routine? I'm not sure.
> 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.
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.
I am more anti-(manufactured)-war than most, but these sights were the stuff of goosebumps.
I'm not sure how the sonic booms of fighter jets compare to passenger planes, though.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How long are we going to keep running up this hamster wheel instead of being satisfied with what we have?
Actually, we don't have to imagine, they got outcompeted and went extinct.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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...
TOO BAD YOU IDIOTS CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO BAN PEOPLE. RETARDS. LEARN TO CODE.