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A vapor cone blooms around an F-22 Raptor as it races through humid air during a supersonic flyby. Photo: Ronald Dejarnett, U.S. Navy
The problem: how to break the sound barrier without rattling windows or nerves on the ground below. NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center is learning how to lessen sonic booms. With barrier-busting airplanes, says Dryden aerospace engineer Edward Haering, “you get shock waves at each gradation in the vehicle’s shape.” It’s when individual shocks from the nose, wing, and tail come together that we hear the thunder down below. That makes a streamlined design a first goal for less jarring supersonic flight. An experimental narwhal-tusk-like “quiet spike” on the nose can help mellow an aircraft’s boom. Newer designs seek to shape shock waves from across the plane to keep them from coalescing into a megaboom. “We think we’re close to having the right tools to design it,” says Haering. “All we’ll need then is the will to build it.” Which could mean, finally, flying from New York City to Los Angeles in less than three hours, without waking up everybody in between. —Thomas Hayden
WHY THE NOISE? Sonic booms happen when anything, from a bullwhip to a fighter jet, moves faster than the speed of sound, compressing sound waves into a powerful shock wave.
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