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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
My parents immigrated to the US in the 80s. They didn't steal anyone's land. Can I complain about rich people wasting fuel, polluting the air, and creating peace-shattering sounds?
And about the stolen land, what should we do about it? Never complain about anything? Have no laws?
Give all of your stolen land back, make all the reparations you owe people, and then go back to lecturing people online.
I had no agency in being born and raised here. Are you saying that by staying in this country, I’m now responsible for stealing land 200 years ago? And my responsibility for stealing this land means I can’t be upset about supersonic jets?
we are as a whole responsible for making the world a better place. everyone with their capacity and their ability to do something. now, i am not trying to judge what you are doing, nor am i suggesting you are not doing enough already. that's not the point. by living in the US you are however in a better position to work on this particular cause than i am living elsewhere. not because you are responsible in the sense of being guilty, but you, and everyone else in the US, is responsible in the sense of there being a wrong that needs to be righted.
otherwise we could just say nobody is responsible because it was all someone else. but if that someone else is not alive anymore then it is up to the current society to step up and fill in. guilt is not required. would you help orphan children whose parents died in an accident even if you were not involved? then why not help these people who have been deprived of their land and are now without the ability to govern themselves? the people of israel got their ancient homeland back after 2 millennia and were allowed to form a sovereign nation long after anyone could reasonably be called responsible for taking their land away. so why not do the same of the native american nations too?
the question is not: are you responsible? but: is there a wrong that needs to be fixed, and are you in a position to contribute to fixing it?
but to your last point: this has nothing to do with being upset about supersonic jets. actually i believe as far as it is reasonable native americans would be upset about noise pollution too, so you would probably be arguing their side here anyways.
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.
WTF? Please don't comment like this on HN. It breaks multiple guidelines. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to keep participating https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
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.
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.
moving fast and breaking things is a perfectly viable strategy when the things being broken aren't personally relevant. in fact this conversation moved so fast that within two comments we went from "external experience of this tech is not pleasant" to "hn is becoming reddit". how am I meant to believe that first guy is degenerating the conversation by sharing his perspective, when his replies do nothing but point at him?
Yep!!! It really has changed and has become exhausting. The most flippant, negative, cynical, and antagonistic replies nowadays, rather than genuine curiosity about the news or optimism.
Too bad because HN has been my “home” on the internet for 15 years.
And the comment you’re replying to, which is entirely a reasonable opinion, was flagged, proving their point. I’ve been here for 18 years and similarly alienated by the cynicism here.
your response doesn't help you make your case. instead of complaining and namecalling the commenter, how about engaging with the comment as the others are doing. if you don't want this place to turn into reddit, then you should not act like you are on reddit.
the mark of a good discussion is that you can respond to a contrary opinion without getting triggered by it.
you seem to have decided that this is progress, but others are clearly not convinced. for myself i don't know if this is the progress we need. but then i believe that the most important progress we need to make is to be more civil to each other and work towards social unity, so that we can discuss technical progress without constantly getting angry at each other, because that, in the end is the biggest obstacle to any progress.
so instead of being part of the problem and making things worse by complaining, try being a part of the solution and engage with the commenters in an earnest but well meaning manner. disagree, ask them to substantiate their claim, or provide counter evidence, but don't derail the discussion with a futile rant.
supersonic flight is not significantly faster than regular flight relative to other modes of transportation. it's not anti progress to be clear eyed out about tradeoffs and costs, especially when the negative side effects primarily don't affect the user of a product but everyone around them.
just because you want to blast your music out loud on a speaker in the subway and i think that's antisocial, doesn't mean i'm anti progress for music technology
Given that I just read this comment after getting off a connecting flight that had me waiting on a fully boarded plane in 100 degree Phoenix weather for half an hour, it’s pretty poignant. I read an article earlier today about how Phoenix may not be inhabitable in twenty years, and I’m here to tell you that it’s already insufferable no matter how well the A/C was or was not working on that plane.
I don’t need a plane that flies faster. I need an airline that puts pure service before profit.
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.
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-...
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.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/db
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.
> 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 (the good kind).
I guess we'll get used to it if that kind of things becomes routine? I'm not sure.
Eventually, that means that there will be some seats in the back of the regular plans for everyday wage slaves.
The low-volume, high-priced rich-person toys (Roadster) finance the scaling up that enables lower-priced mass-manufactured product (Model 3).
It's not more viable now wealth inequality just means that there are more rich people to benefit.
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.
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
Oh! Really?
https://earinc.com/gunfire-noise-level-reference-chart/
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.
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 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.
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
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 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.
> 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...
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
> Several U.S. companies are working on a new generation of luxurious supersonic passenger aircraft with much quieter sonic booms and improved fuel efficiency
The 108 dB sonic boom will be experienced over a much larger area.
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.
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?
Of course that's the theory. The Trump Admin just allowed for a fairly audible boom.
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
And about the stolen land, what should we do about it? Never complain about anything? Have no laws?
Give all of your stolen land back, make all the reparations you owe people, and then go back to lecturing people online.
When people talk about this stuff, it isn't about apportioning blame.
I'm not big on the stolen land thing because it's turtles all the way down, but this idea of divvying up blame makes no sense. We are all citizens.
otherwise we could just say nobody is responsible because it was all someone else. but if that someone else is not alive anymore then it is up to the current society to step up and fill in. guilt is not required. would you help orphan children whose parents died in an accident even if you were not involved? then why not help these people who have been deprived of their land and are now without the ability to govern themselves? the people of israel got their ancient homeland back after 2 millennia and were allowed to form a sovereign nation long after anyone could reasonably be called responsible for taking their land away. so why not do the same of the native american nations too?
the question is not: are you responsible? but: is there a wrong that needs to be fixed, and are you in a position to contribute to fixing it?
but to your last point: this has nothing to do with being upset about supersonic jets. actually i believe as far as it is reasonable native americans would be upset about noise pollution too, so you would probably be arguing their side here anyways.
I don't agree with this point of view either.
Calling this nimbyism is billionaire psyop lol
I shit my pants until the 8th grade.
I'm a big bitch that can't handle mere words without losing my tiny little mind.
Tom How: Professional Dicksucker
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.
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.
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.
Great memories.
These things are indeed "The Devil's Hairdryer"
It's not the hearing damage, it's the psychological stress.
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.
On a site like HN this kind of progress should be praised not denigrated as antisocial.
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.
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.
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.
Too bad because HN has been my “home” on the internet for 15 years.
the mark of a good discussion is that you can respond to a contrary opinion without getting triggered by it.
you seem to have decided that this is progress, but others are clearly not convinced. for myself i don't know if this is the progress we need. but then i believe that the most important progress we need to make is to be more civil to each other and work towards social unity, so that we can discuss technical progress without constantly getting angry at each other, because that, in the end is the biggest obstacle to any progress.
so instead of being part of the problem and making things worse by complaining, try being a part of the solution and engage with the commenters in an earnest but well meaning manner. disagree, ask them to substantiate their claim, or provide counter evidence, but don't derail the discussion with a futile rant.
just because you want to blast your music out loud on a speaker in the subway and i think that's antisocial, doesn't mean i'm anti progress for music technology
I don’t need a plane that flies faster. I need an airline that puts pure service before profit.
At this point, airlines make most of their actual profit from credit cards.
I forget who said it, but "airlines are banks that happen to fly planes" is true, at least profit wise.
https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2025-releases/2025-12-09-0...