Concorde used its afterburners on take off and having worked at Heathrow during the era of Concorde’s life I can confirm that there was never any doubt when it was taking off. The glow from the exhaust and the noise made a pretty eye catching display though.
The engines (Olympus 593 turbojets) were tested in part on the Vulcan which seems appropriate given the similarity of the airframe shape
On preview I see you beat me to it Pjen … but I have a picture!
I grew up in Oshkosh Wisconsin, home to a very large airshow each summer. The Concorde SST was a regular visitor and I can confirm that it was an incredibly loud aircraft.
Sometime in the late 80s the Italian Aerobatic team, Frecce Tricolori, was at the airshow and one of the jets accidentally went supersonic during the routine. It cracked 3 windows at the home of one of my friends that lived next to the airport, so broken windows are a definite danger.
I think this bears repeating. I for one had thought for years that there only was one boom at the time the aircraft passes the speed of sound and that’s it.
Untrue on both counts. All scientists knew that supersonic flight was possible. Some engineers thought that it might be sufficiently difficult to be impractical. And some scientists were sufficiently curious about the possibility of the atmosphere igniting from an a-bomb that they did the calculations. On seeing the results of the calculations, they then knew that an a-bomb would not ignite the atmosphere.
I was on a carrier in Norfolk, VA when we were having a change of command for the Captian. Six Navy jets were to fly over the ship at the close of command change at a speed just under the sound barrier. During practice all went well, but on the day of the event the weather changed. I had worked all night setting up chairs for the event, and was sleeping when the six planes flu over. Because of the weather change all six planes broke the sound barrier. I was totally knocked out of my bunk onto the deck, but the real damage was the Navy had to pay for the replacement of thousands of windows.
Does a zombie breaking the speed of sound make a boom?
I was in Alamogordo (right by White Sands) a few weeks ago. My clock radio alarm went off just in time for the weather report. Included with the temperatures and whatnot: “Possibility of sonic booms from 9 am to 6 pm.” Didn’t hear any, but I got a laugh out of that.
How high would a supersonic plane have to fly for the sonic boom not to be significantly felt by people and windows?
it’s called a zomboom.
I heard them locally on 9/11 and I heard one out west while under a natural bridge. They rattled windows pretty severely and I was worried that the natural bridge was going to loosen the rocks above me. It was a substantial shock wave.
One of the last test missions I flew involved a supersonic release of a certain weapon over one of the land ranges. To obtain the data needed from the test mission, we had to track the bomb all the way to the ground. So we come ripping down the chute with our asses on fire in a pair of F-15s (the lead airplane was an F-15E, sometimes known as a Mud Hen because it is intended for air to ground bombing), release the bomb, and then Lead pulls up to get out of our way as we follow the bomb, and in the process we dragged the nose of of a supersonic fighter in damn near a full circle. Shattered windows all over the area. Switchboards at the base lit up with angry callers, and many claims for damages were filed. I remember hearing some farmer filed a claim claiming his cows would no longer produce milk…dunno how that turned out.
Other times, we’d buzz boats in the Gulf of Mexico. One particular boat was suspected of being a Russian spy vessel, so we gave him a free air show—lots of booms for Ivan.
I think that nockcire001 is a necromancer.
I used to live under the flightline for NOB Norfolk. other than the ability to sleep through anything, and to ID most Navy planes by sound, there is nothing like that 0500 C-5 flight going out every morning…
Zombie Chunkin’! Moooooooooooaaaaaaaaannnnnnnn <SPLAT>
The Israelis, I read somewhere, used to fly runs over Gaza just to scare the bejesus out of people and remind them who they were dealing with.
The concussion and sound, as has been mentioned above, is all the more intense when it comes clear out of the blue (my experience, as a journalist, with Lancer and unidentified jets in Israel).
