Word: sst
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While chairing a joint congressional subcommittee hearing on the SST two weeks ago, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire labeled the program a waste. At issue was whether Congress should appropriate another $290 million to help industry develop the aircraft. The Government has already spent more than $700 million, and plans to spend a total of at least $1.3 billion. Along with the spiraling cost, Senator Proxmire was angered by the Department of Transportation's failure to present reports on the ecological effects of the SST to Russell Train, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality...
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...
Proponents of the SST point out that the aircraft represents a technological advance in aviation, with valuable spin-offs for other segments of the economy. They also stress that every effort is being made to make the aircraft environmentally compatible. A major blast against SST critics was delivered recently in a trade journal article by Wayne W. Parrish, aviation editor of Ziff-Davis Publishing. Said Parrish of the yet-to-be-flown U.S. SST: "There is nothing quite so convenient as a target that hasn't been seen or heard...
Atlantic River. All the same, SST 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...