As for climate change and oil use, all aviation globally is only about 7% of oil use and about 3% of carbon emissions. It’s not the main thing to worry about.

Coal fired electricity followed by oil fired land transport (mostly easily electrified cars) are together well over 50% of all emissions and are the easiest things to fix. Deforestation and agricultural emissions are also up there. All of these sources are way easier and cheaper to address than decarbonizing aviation.

Since the retirement of the Concorde we've regrettably had to use fighter jets for some of these life-saving flights. Sure, rich people subsidized all of it to shave a few hours off their business flights, but given how much avgas Elon's jet uses, it is really more efficient if they half the people who would take a supersonic flight take small private jets instead?

It’s lightning/thunder: you will be able to see the plane, and then after a bit, hear the boom. You won’t be able to hear other plane noise, all of the combined noise from turbulence and engines is forced back into the boom.

It is shorter duration, yes, but MUCH louder: F-18s at 5000 feet can rattle windows on the ground! Usually not a good trade-off.

Source: this picture from the Boom XB-1 website, which was originally made by Pennsylvania State University: https://boomsupersonic.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/xb-1-b...

You can't completely make the sonic boom go away, but you can change how it's experienced on the ground through careful design of the airplane shape. The X-59 Quesst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-59_Quesst#De...) is an experimental supersonic aircraft that reportedly reduces the sound of the sonic boom to something comparable to a 'car door closing', mostly by ensuring that different shockwaves created by different parts of the plane don't combine into a single, stronger boom.

> can it be used to make non-supersonic planes quieter, too?

Sadly no; the principles of design are very different for sonic booms and ordinary plane noise. For ordinary aircraft, the big causes of noise are the engines themselves and turbulence over the airframe.

That being said, the problem of ordinary aircraft noise is usually limited to the areas near an airport. Sonic booms are noticed underneath the entire flight path of a supersonic aircraft, even when it's flying at altitude.

Not really. Supersonic means faster than sound. Meaning that the plane flies faster than the sound. Even its own sound. So you would hear nothing before the sonic boom reaches you. Because the sound didn't have time to get to your ears yet.

> I think a supersonic aircraft is constantly "dragging" a boom behind it.

What was really revealing to me is to look at shadowgraph images of supersonic wind tunnel test. Like this one: https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/s3300054/800wm/S3300054...

You can see the dark airplane looking shape. That's the model of the airplane in the wind tunnel. And then you can see that V shaped shadow edge starting from the tip of the nose. That's the sonic boom. It is a sudden step change in pressure. In this visualisation it appears as two lines, but in reality it is a cone centered on the tip of the nose (or other protrusions.)

Where and when your ear crosses that cone surface that's where you experience a sonic boom.

> How do you make the sonic boom go away?

If I understand it correctly their plan is not to make it not happen, but to fly such that the pressure wave is bent upwards away from the ground. Which sounds like a weather dependent trick. I recommend the video in the article which shows the idea.

So this happens to be rockets. In most plane videos you have sound of other aircraft in the video. This is because people are usually recording at air-shows. It's really hard to find a clean version!

You can't, but you can prevent it from reaching the ground.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdJWIkwxjcA