Okay…
Yes. It was a response to the SST/Concorde. And broken civilian windows. 
When I was in kindergarten, 1967, we were out at recess when some YUGE plane flew over at about 200 feet. I didn’t know my planes in those days - could have been a B36 or B52.
There is an Air Nat Guard base in Milwaukee. I remember back in the 60’s and 70’s the evening news warning about sonic booms the next day during training and such.
But we lived 37 miles away so never got to experience them much. The last one I ever saw/heard was about 10 years ago in Virginia Beach.
Topical …
Does anyone know if sonic booms occur during air shows?
Yeah, I grew up in the L.A. area in the late 50s and 60s, and that’s when I remember hearing sonic booms. Haven’t heard one in ages.
Do you remember when they used to launch space, er, stuff from Vandenberg? There’d be really weird looking patterns in the sky afterwards, especially after dark. I was out jogging once, and some people were looking at one of these post-launch formations and were wondering what it was (someone said something about aliens…ha), and I just jogged by and said “Vandenberg.”
Seconded. I used to hear them all the time during my summer stays at my grandparents near Memmingen, in Southern Germany, where there was an air base nearby. That was the late 60s and the 70s.
I also remember hearing a sonic boom from Concorde. That one was loud, and after the double bang came the engine noise, which was also louder than the normal planes back then, which were much louder than today. That must have been the late 70s, but I am no longer sure where it was.
It’s something I associate with being on the beach as a kid - so late '60s, say - far north west England. Mountains on one side, Irish sea on the other, so the ideal military training ground I guess. They were noteworthy but not astonishing - that sort of level of frequency.
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lol I hear them 3 to 4 times a day as I live in the antelope valley (home of Edwards air force base Lockheed’s plant 42 and others) in California where 90- percent of the military aircraft gets created and or tested
So much so that we get reminded that 1 taking pictures of any aircraft in the air and posting them without some sort of clearance might get you arrested for espionage or at least a lecture about security … and 2 that weird aircraft flying around at 2 am is not a ufo it’s just another test…
I had totally forgotten about the weird lights. We knew what they were, but we still told ghost stores under them.
About 5 years ago, an AWACS E-3 (Boeing 707 based) was practicing landings at an airport a few miles from my work. It kept coming in low over the top of my building. It was very loud, and seemed like it filled my window as it came into view. Seemed like it happened 10 times over a couple of hours. Very distracting.
This brings back memories of my childhood, specifically 1962-63. My family was living in an apartment not too far away from the St. Louis airport. In addition to being the home base for the Missouri Air National Guard, the airport was also the home of McDonnell Aircraft, maker of the F-4 Phantom. Between the National Guard hot rodders who “forgot” the rule about not going supersonic until they got to the designated training area out in the Ozarks, and the McDonnell test pilots who were charged with taking off with full afterburners and climbing straight up, having our windows rattled wasn’t uncommon.
Yep! I live on the Central Coast now and still see them regularly.
There were booms in Phoenix in the late 60’s when I lived there.
We were watching the first Shuttle landing on the TV at the Cal Poly dorms when we heard the windows rattle with a boom; we assumed somebody was blowing off a big firework. Then about 30 seconds later the first images appeared on the TV and we all realized it was the Shuttle. A couple of hours later, some students were finishing up surfing in Morro Bay and were looking up at the sky and heard the boom-boom and were able to see a small UFO overhead zipping along at a crazy speed to the east. They, too, didn’t realize at first what it was–then came enlightenment.
Manage to sneak into Edwards AFB for the second landing (some cock and bull story got us in). There was a camera on the control tower and we figured out that once it started slewing, that was the time to look up. And it did. As flew overhead, it gave off some puffs of smoke (I guess as visual indicator) and some kind of announcement that it was about 50,000 above. And the BOOM…BOOM; very distinct time difference between the sonic booms, and actually feeling it in the chest.
Two minutes later, it was on the ground rolling to a stop. A flying brick with feathers is pretty apt description.
Also live on the Central Coast; could hear the sonic booms from the Space-X launch a few years ago from pretty far away (30 miles; I think the atmospheric conditions were just right for us to hear it). Clearly the most spectacular launch I’ve ever seen–this is the stuff I thought would be common place after watching Kubrick’s 2001 as a kid.
50’s kid, San Diego: If memory serves they weren’t at all uncommon.
Yup. Me too.
Relatively common in the early 60s, then the DoD tightened up on routinely booming the populace. With exceptions right around Edwards and other test facilities.
When I was flying fighters out of Nellis AFB in Las Vegas in the 1980s we had a very limited area where supersonic flight was permitted. It was over some very, very, very uninhabited land. And even then supersonic training missions were carefully pre-scheduled and the amount of them per pilot per year was tightly rationed.
If we exceeded Mach 1 elsewhere (easy to do inadvertently) we had to fill out a bunch of paperwork and get yelled at by the Boss after he’d been yelled at by the Bigger Boss.
Obviously all restrictions are off if the guys/gals sitting air defense alert or counter terrorist-airliner-takeover alert get scrambled to investigate a situation. Nowadays the latter is probably the most common source of booms over the USA.
yeah in the 90s the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale asked Edwards not to boom between sundown and 9 am if possible and after some negotiation, they agreed not to unless it was the shuttle …
This mysterious boom has been shown to be the result of a large meteor over the Bristol Channel.
The skies were overcast in that region but it was spotted from Wales and Jersey.
Not unless someone has screwed up. The Blue Angels and Thunderbirds performances both feature a “sneak pass” maneuver, during which a formation of several planes distracts the crowd while a solo plane approaches from another direction at high speed. Here’s an example (the sneak pass starts around 0:36):
The sneak pass is fast - about 700 MPH - but not supersonic. The sound volume does rise rather suddenly as the aircraft approaches, which ends up being a dramatic surprise for the audience - but there’s no destructive sonic boom. And you wouldn’t want one, since air shows tend to happen in populated areas with plenty of delicate windows and such.
Out on the open ocean, you can do supersonic passes without worrying about causing damage. Here’s one:
True - but still a sonic boom caused by an object in flight … 