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
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.
Oh! Really?
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?
> Several U.S. companies are working on a new generation of luxurious supersonic passenger aircraft with much quieter sonic booms and improved fuel efficiency
It's not the hearing damage, it's the psychological stress.
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.
Go back to reddit to post your anti progress stuff. HN was supposed to be about tech and startups and improving the world.
It's basically unbearable at this point. Every single thread is full of this stuff. It's incredibly sad.
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...
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.
I don't agree with this point of view either.
Calling this nimbyism is billionaire psyop lol
Of course that's the theory. The Trump Admin just allowed for a fairly audible boom.