Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Sonic Boom

Yesterday I heard a sonic boom. It freaked me out. I was standing outside doing a little trimming while an auto-glass repairman was putting on some finishing touches on Joe's windshield. There was an extremely loud "boom, boom" followed a few seconds later by another identical "boom, boom" (the echo, maybe?). The repairman asked me if there was a range nearby, and I told him I had no idea what the sound was from. I figured I'd probably find something out later and kind of shrugged it off. I thought maybe something had exploded.

I told Joe about it, but he hadn't heard anything from where he was. He did hear what the noise was from on his way home from work, and he emailed me a link to a story about it.

The president was in Seattle yesterday, and an aircraft flew into the restricted airspace. In response, two F15 military fighter jets were scrambled from Portland. They accelerated to supersonic speed, but the small aircraft had left the restricted airspace before the jets arrived. The violating plane landed on Lake Washington, where the pilot and his female passenger were questioned by Secret Service.

911 call centers were overloaded as a result of the incident, and people reported their houses being shaken.

1 comment:

The Absent Minded Housewife said...

That's pretty funny. No one would bat an eye about a sonic boom here. Those pilots train over my area. I could literally tell how well the war was going depending on how often we'd heard sonic booms.

Your planes must have been pretty low in the air though.