Sonic boom heard over Washington is a rare sound with a rich history

By BEN FINLEY
Associated Press

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — People living in and around the nation’s capital experienced a rare, if startling, sound: A sonic boom. The U.S. military had dispatched six fighter jets on Sunday to intercept an unresponsive business plane that was flying over restricted airspace. The Air Force gave the F-16s permission to fly faster than the speed of sound to catch up with the wayward Cessna. The result was a thunderous rumble. The U.S. government rarely gives permission to civilian aircraft to travel that fast. The last supersonic aircraft to carry passengers was the Concorde. It stopped flying in 2003. But new companies as well as NASA are working on new technology to reduce sonic booms from supersonic aircraft.