Odd O'blography

Flight Pattern

Way back in the 1960's, we would occasionally hear the sonic boom of fighter jets as they trained over the sparsely occupied state of Montana. They operated from Malmstrom AFB, near Great Falls. It took them only a few minutes to scramble and rattle our windows even though their base was more than 100 miles away. Sometimes they came over at low altitude and scared the crap out of cows and cowboys alike. Sometimes, I could actually feel the sonic boom vibrating my internal organs.

The skies got quieter when the FAA banned sonic booms in 1973. That pretty much killed the Concorde SST, the world's only supersonic commercial jet aircraft. Some said it was a political decision to aid the US aviation industry, but the Air Force was sitting on thousands of noise complaints and damage claims. Today, sonic booms are limited to over-ocean flights, emergency scrambles, and a couple of designated USAF training areas.

In 1980, I visited the H. W. Ward company, near Birmingham, England to provide technical assistance with a new CNC lathe that they were developing. They built the iron bits, and my company provided the controller. As we left for lunch one day, a Harrier jet came screaming overhead at what seemed like tree-top altitude and reminded me of the fighter planes that had frightened me as a child.

"What the hell are they doing?" I asked the engineer who'd been assigned as my 'minder'.

"It's just a training exercise," Geoff said. "Happens all the time."

"Directly over the city? Seems dangerous, why are they allowed to do that?"

Geoff gave me an odd look and said, "Where else are they going to go?"

At that moment, the light bulb came on. I suddenly realized that the Harrier jet would leave British airspace in about twenty minutes no matter what direction it went. All of Britain is barely large enough to do a reasonable practice run. I looked it up later and found that the entire island (80,823 sq mi) could be fitted inside the rectangular borders of Montana (147,040 sq mi). No folding necessary, and there'd still be a lot of empty space around the edges. I also realized that even though those Harrier flights were subsonic, they annoyed more than sixty times as many people!