@crazyguy32100
Hearing damage from long term noise is something that everyone knows about but few people seem to care. I called the tinnitus help line the other day about mine, all the phone did was ring.
@bbbnuyyyy
on the bingo card i would fill in “company blames victim” the FAA not paying out 94% of damage claims saying ‘damage due to poor building quality’ ..cuz ofc structures are not built to a code in order to withstand 700 sonic booms in 3 months
@RaymondSwanson-u9y
Scientific thinking: We know it's very loud. We know it causes damage. But we don't know how much of both people will tolerate. So let's test it! Government thinking: And we'll do so by picking the people most likely not to complain!
@mark_wotney9972
Two additional factors in selecting Oklahoma City: 1. FAA had a large office there. 2. Senator Mike Mansfield from Oklahoma was a big proponent of the SST. Seemed fair to boom his voters.
@tiagobuarki
John, we have a city here in Brazil, Maceió, that is sinking into the ground because of bad mining practices in the area. This is right up your alley.
@Doxymeister
I was raised about 20 miles east of OKC, and a bit north of Tinker Air Force base. I distinctly remember this era, because my Mom worked downtown teaching English and business at a private college. Years later, in the early 80's, my parents had relocated to western Oklahoma, to a small town north of Anadarko--a bit north of the flight pattern shown on your slide. My Mom owned a ceramic shop, taught classes and fired ceramic objects for people. For some bizarre reason, fighter pilots (not sure whether they were out of Ft. Sill?) began making passes over the shop building, which was a two-story structure sitting on the crest of the highest hill for miles around--that hill/building was like a beacon for them. This was years after the ban on sonic booms, mind you. They came in flights of four jets each. It's not that they broke windows or anything like that. It was that the sonic booms caused such vibration that it knocked greenware (dried clay slip that hadn't yet been fired) off of the shelves, ruining hundreds of dollars of greenware that we'd have to pour all over again. Mom's calls were ignored until I got a camera and began taking pictures of the jets as they came over--up until then the answer Mom got was "You can't say who's aircraft that is, can you?" which is code for "Shut up, b*t*h". Anyway, took copies of the pictures to law enforcement, then to the base/fort commanders then threatened media involvement. Took a whole summer of fighting them, but they finally made them quit buzzing our hilltop.
@AgingMillennial
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments were still going on in 1964, so the concept of protecting test subjects from harm wasn’t much of a thing in the US.
@ronkemperful
Sonic booms used to be a routine happening, often occurring several times a month in the Reno Nevada of the 1960s. Since that time I only remember one other sonic boom, it was at approximately 8:30 in the morning on the 18th of May at 8:30 in the morning... it was that of Mt. Saint Helens blowing up and I heard that sound hundreds of miles away in Spokane Washington.
@williamrooth
They also tested in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1964 as well. We also were very aviation friendly, but the city residents took offense to these after about 3 months and it took another 3 months for them to end the practice. I would bet that there were other cities that were used as well. I know about this because I experienced this as a child in those days.
@kcgunesq
I would have marked "company blames customer" due to the whole "poorly built homes" excuse.
@cmaylo
Operation Bongo II is one of my favorite names for government shenanigans.
@t.hartman1063
Another reason for the selection of Oklahoma City: It is home to Tinker Air Force Base and the FAA Aeronautical Center.
@MichaelRBaron
I tell my kids, "there was a time when one could fly from NYC to Paris in 2 hours and change. They were awestruck with the concept.
@6yjjk
My parents used to have a static caravan down near Land's End. Every evening, at roughly the same time, the windows would rattle slightly. This was the sonic boom from Concorde, accelerating in the Bristol Channel roughly 100 miles away.
@sjones26573
Oklahoma, where the booms come sweepin’ down the plain.
@davidconner-shover51
I grew up in a very rural area in Southern Utah. Military jets would regularly fly supersonic at low altitudes overhead. Worse, I lived in a valley with steep sides. the only way I knew it was a jet, and not something huge blowing up was the double thump, and the rumble of the engines afterward. the sucker was out of sight by the time I looked up.
@kevinbarry71
you mentioned Lockheed took some government money to look into this program. After a while, Kelly Johnson, the legendary designer said the whole thing was a terrible idea and return the government's money
@bullnukeoldman3794
Around this same time in the early 1960s the US Air Force did similar testing in my Ohio city. The Air Force rented a house two blocks away from mine and installed several large gray test units in it. It made sense as my neighborhood was on the flight path to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Runway 26, about 19 miles away. Every sort of aircraft began flying over us - B-52s, various cargo planes, fighter jets, etc. Supersonic flight tests were mixed into all this traffic. My mother hated it - the sonic booms created a crack in the dining room plaster ceiling, the dishes and plates in the corner cabinet would rattle as would the individual glass panes in the cabinet door. I was 11 or 12 years old and, of course, loved it. As I remember the testing lasted about 60 days but mother remained upset about it to her dying day some 40+ years later.
@mabybee
The NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics were founded in 1966 - beginning play in 1967 - and were named as a nod to the aviation industry in Seattle, specifically Boeing and the SST project, with various tests conducted over Oklahoma City a few years prior. In a twist of irony, roughly 60 years later in 2008, the Seattle SuperSonics relocated to Oklahoma City in one of the most contentious relocations in American sports history and became known as the Oklahoma City Thunder. Edit: as pointed out in the comments, my math is embarrassingly deficient. It was roughly 40 years, not 60, between when they began play in Seattle and when they relocated to Oklahoma City.
@PlainlyDifficult