Banning the Boom

Santa Barbara, Calif., is a pleasant, red-tile-roofed community much favored by retired couples, but of late it has acquired a grave drawback: it is in close proximity to several Navy and Air Force bases, including Hamilton Air Force Base now being used by the over-2,000-m.p.h. SR-71 reconnaissance plane. As a result, Santa Barbara, by the count of one irate citizen, was bombed with a sonic boom for 75 successive days this summer. "It's ghastly," says Mrs. George M. Sidenberg, both the wife and mother of Navy aviators. "One boom nearly threw me out of bed at 10 p.m. I was here for the 1950 Santa Barbara earthquake, and it felt just like that."

Art Dealer Walter Silva has seen his paintings shaken off the wall; girls in the suburban Montecito Post Office live in fear the next boom will shatter their office's plate glass window; and Archie Banks, who watches for booms on his seismograph, says that they leave tracks on the recording drums like those of minor earthquakes. In response, Santa Barbarans have been bombarding city hall to do something. Last week city hall did. By a vote of 6-1, the city council passed an ordinance declaring a sonic boom an "unlawful public nuisance," with fines up to $500 or 60 days in jail.

Trail of Terror. Lone standout was Mayor Don MacGillivray, a World War II aviator, who firmly believes: "We're going to have to put up with some inconveniences for defense and research--and besides, this ordinance is unenforceable." Not even the ban's supporters seriously thought they were going to catch supersonic culprits up in the air, but they did hope it would at least serve as a precedent. Says Santa Barbara City Attorney Stanley Tomlinson: "I know we'll come in for some kidding about this, but it's high time somebody somewhere spoke out against this darned nuisance."

Thus Santa Barbara became the first municipality to ban the boom, but it is far from being alone in discovering that it could not live with the boom without hating it. Unlike noise from a subsonic jet, which builds up gradually as the plane approaches, sonic boom comes as a bang without warning.

Since the Air Force's SR-71 began flying over Chicago three months ago, the Chanute Air Force Base in downstate Illinois has received 1,630 letters of complaint, 1,497 of them claiming damage (usually cracked plaster and glass) caused by sonic booms. In Boston, the Air Force and Air Guard are formally investigating a recent boom that, according to newspaper accounts, knocked scores of pedestrians off their feet, leaving "a trail of terror."

Servant or Scourge? The most determined opponent of sonic boom--and of the nation's plans to build a supersonic transport (SST)--is Harvard Physicist William Shurcliff, 58, who worked on the atomic bomb with Vannevar Bush, and is now senior research associate at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator. Six months ago, Shurcliff, with nine friends, founded the Citizen's League Against the Sonic Boom, and membership has since grown to 1,320 in 45 states. In letters to members and newspaper ads, Shurcliff has propounded his fears that the SST might ultimately be permitted to fly at supersonic speeds across land as well as water--a possibility that the Federal Aviation Agency has not ruled out.

A single SST flying supersonic across the U.S., believes Shurcliff, would trail behind it a bang zone 50 miles wide that could destroy the peace of 20 million Americans. He also argues that competition from cheaper, larger "jumbo jets"--which will produce no sonic boom--could turn the SST venture into "a gigantic boomdoggle" with the taxpayers absorbing most of the loss. "We all believe in progress," he says for his group, "but some things just aren't progress. Aviation should be the servant of man, not his scourge."

Though the Federal Government has already spent upwards of $3,000,000 on research, it has still not decided what strength of sonic boom--if any--will be "acceptable" in populated areas. After the FAA bombarded Oklahoma City with eight booms a day for six months in 1964, three out of four inhabitants said they could tolerate it--but one out of four said he could not.

One hopeful note is that altitude attenuates the boom. The SST will take off and land at subsonic speeds, and officials believe that if the plane cruises at over 60,000 ft., the noise would be muted to a thunderlike rumble. One thing Santa Barbara has made clear: no city is likely to tolerate being bombarded night and day by unexpected thunderclaps. The answer must be found reasonably soon. The Anglo-French supersonic Concorde is scheduled to begin flights before next spring, and the SST is expected to fly four years later.

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