Word: sonics
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...luxury for the jet set, saving inconsequential hours at huge cost, and potentially a lethal one for everyone. It might pollute the upper air, even cause skin cancer by hampering the formation of the ozone layer that filters out ultraviolet sunlight, create intolerable noise at airports and monstrous, destructive sonic booms while it was airborne. Finally, they argued, it would take millions of dollars that could be better spent. The day before the vote last Thursday, the lobbyists were still at work, pressing their case in the offices of several Senators...
Monsters run the joint. There is, for instance, a bundle of fuzz with pingpong-ball eyes and a sonic boom of a voice known only as Cookie Monster (no middle initial). His appetite is so fierce that, given a choice between ten thousand dollars and a cookie, he opts immediately for the latter. There are other creatures on the show, like Bert and Erniehumanoids with cartoon hands, three fingers and a thumb. Bert, who has one frowning eyebrow, chivvies Mutt-and-Jeff style with Ernie, a bulbous-nosed charmer whose favorite sport is sitting in the tub, rhapsodizing...
Bang-Zone. Like Proxmire, ecologists are concerned about the potential threat of the SST to the environment. Many of their misgivings are documented in the S/S/T and Sonic Boom Handbook, a hot-selling (150,000 copies to date) paperback edited by William Shurcliff, director of a pressure group called the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. The Handbook contends that a single SST, flying from New York to California, would leave a "bang-zone" 50 miles wide by 2,000 miles long. But some tests indicate that this bang at SST's operational height of 60,000 ft. will...
While SST flights may be banned from populated areas, some ecologists fear that economic necessity may reverse this pattern. If this happens, they say, sonic booms generated as SSTs fly at speeds in excess of the speed of sound could upset people who do delicate work (brain surgeons) and may also harm persons with nervous ailments...
...defenders have still not offered convincing proposals for dealing with the supersonics' most pressing problem: ear-shattering "sideline" noise generated at takeoff and landing. According to one estimate, the airport roar of a single SST will match that of five jumbo jets. Proposed solutions to sideline noise and sonic boom have thus far been less than encouraging. Some scientists have proposed recycling jet engine exhausts to reduce noise. Others have suggested powerful electrostatic fields to ionize and brush aside air molecules before they can pile up and form boom-producing shock waves...