Word: sonics
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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...
...weight of fresh snow, they may lose their ability to interlock. They degenerate into coarser, larger crystals and sometimes even into lumps of ice. Such "old" snow cannot maintain a good grip on the soil or underlying layers of snow. The slightest disturbance may tear it free: the sonic boom of a passing aircraft, the stresses created by a pair of skis...
...pistes may be closed, and whole villages may be evacuated on a word from the Weissfluhjoch. Even the Swiss air force checks with the institute before sending its supersonic Mirages aloft during the avalanche season, seeking reassurance that sonic booms will not cause unsuspecting villagers to be engulfed in a deadly white tide...
Room for Criticism. Despite the President's vigorous tone and concrete proposals, the message invited some criticism. No mention was made of the danger of oil pollution from proliferating offshore wells, or the environmentally absurd SST, with its sonic boom and probable pollution of the stratosphere. Nixon offered no proposals for curbing exhaust from the 83 million old cars now on the roads. Moreover the President paid little attention to the key problem of enforcement. Last fall, for example, the Federal Government announced that DDT must soon be phased out of use in the U.S. But delaying actions...