Does anyone know when an aircraft exceeds the speed of sound does the sonic boom occur only at the precise moment the speed of sound is passed and only heard once on the ground, or does the boom follow the aircraft and does everyone over the flight path hear the boom for as long as the plane stays above mach 1?
The ‘sonic boom’ is the shock wave passing your location, so it travels along with the aircraft.
There’s a graphic in the Wikipedia entry which helps to illustrate it:
The others are correct. You could fly in a supersonic plane from Boston to Los Angeles and a significant fraction of the population of the U.S. would be able to hear it as it passes overhead. That is a big reason airliners haven’t changed much in terms of speed in the last 5 decades or so. The sonic boom occurs through the entire supersonic flight path.
Hadouken
Bolding mine.
Everybody else covered the answer. I’d like to hear more about these supersonic subterrainean aircraft that fly lower than all the people standing around on the ground.
Holy Tremors, Batman.