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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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"
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
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.
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...