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by throwaway85825 25 days ago
Military gets away with things that private industry doesn't. Supersonic passenger planes would be flying every day on a schedule, far far more than military. Commercial planes are also rated for far more flight hours.
1 comments

Yes, the military ones were infrequent. I'm sure it would get annoying if it was too often.

> Military gets away with things that private industry doesn't.

For good reason. You cannot train for hedgehopping to avoid radar detection without flying low with firewalled throttles.

Overland private supersonic travel should not happen, it would just be a massive unpriced negative externality.

The lower the plane flies the fewer people end up hearing the boom. The denser air also requires an absurd amount of fuel to fly through. Commercially uneconomical. Even the military only uses low level supersonic for a last dash to the target.

When Boom was testing last year, the sonic boom never reached the ground, as I recall. That can be arranged at higher altitudes, but doesn't work at low ones.
That's only possible under specific climatic conditions where there's separate temperature/pressure layers. Which is why they asked to repeal the ban on supersonic flight over populated areas. If they actually thought it wouldn't make noise they wouldn't be asking for the rule to be changed.
The rule bans the supersonic flight regardless of whether it's audible or not, so they'd still be asking for the rule to be changed.
They didn't ask for only a non audible change, because they know that it will not be. It's just marketing and misdirection because the truth is much less rosy.