【By Observer Net Columnist, Jibuluo】
Several months ago, the White House website published a new "Fact Sheet" titled "President Trump's Wise Decision Leads Global Supersonic Aviation." After removing all the "winning studies" flattery, it means:
President Trump abolished the U.S. land-based civil supersonic flight ban that had been in place for over half a century through an executive order.
What is the "land-based civil supersonic flight ban," and why does it exist? What is its relationship with the once-hyped "Concorde"? This article will briefly introduce the relevant technical issues and the development status of China and the United States, and analyze the possible impact of this change by Trump.
Market Demand for Supersonic Passenger Aircraft and the Advantage of the "Concorde" - Sonic Boom
The narrowest part of the North Atlantic south of Greenland is about 3000 kilometers, with an average width between 4800-6700 kilometers. Since Columbus discovered the American continent, European Christian whites have continuously migrated to cultivate, develop industry, commerce, and transoceanic trade, building their own social organizations and national regimes on the basis of genocide, slavery, and forced labor, creating brilliant cultural and scientific achievements, turning the North Atlantic into their inland sea, forming today's so-called "Western Europe" civilization.
"Western Europe" is formally divided into different national sovereign states, but as a macro historical-cultural whole and market, they cannot be separated, and there is a trend of political and legal integration. This drives continuous improvement of tools across the Atlantic, from Columbus' "Santa Maria" fast-sailing ship to the Titanic and Olympic large cruise ships, and then to the birth and popularization of transatlantic civilian flights, which are all manifestations of this civilization's "internal self-integration" intrinsic demand. It is this internal demand that generated the objective market for the Concorde supersonic passenger aircraft in the 1960s when the aviation industry entered the M2 stage and transoceanic jet routes became feasible, supporting its operation for 50 years and achieving some commercial profitability.
Compared to this, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union had no need for frequent long-distance travel to friendly countries, and its Central Asian and Far Eastern regions were not developed enough to support the operating costs of a Concorde (blue)-style supersonic passenger aircraft. The Tu-144 (red) was a purely face-saving project, which doomed its failure in passenger operations.
The United States, while being part of the "North Atlantic Western European civilization," is a vast country, but its territorial pattern is significantly different from that of the Soviet Union. From a three-dimensional spatial perspective, the Soviet territory is a "jue" shape enclosing the Earth's North Pole, while only a few isolated points east of the Urals are traditional prosperous areas, distributed along the north-south direction and within the range of medium-range missile ranges. In contrast, the main 48 states of the United States are close to a long rectangle, and like a typical colonial country, its inland hinterland is empty, with political, economic, and cultural centers distributed along the near-coastal areas of the East (North Atlantic), South (Gulf of Mexico), West (Pacific and Northwest Pacific region), and North (Great Lakes), with the main essence concentrated in the East Coast developed since the 17th century and the West Coast developed since the 19th century. These two coastlines are slightly narrower than the North Atlantic, with an average distance of about 4000 kilometers, and Seattle to Miami is about 4400 kilometers, while San Diego to Boston is about 4200 kilometers. A plane with a speed of M2.0 (approximately 2100 km/h at an altitude of 18,000 meters) would theoretically have a similar speed advantage over the North Atlantic as the Concorde.
Then, why did the U.S. research on the first generation of supersonic passenger aircraft in the 1960s ultimately end up in a greater failure than the Soviet Union?
There are many reasons, in addition to well-known factors such as the moon landing project taking up resources and excessive ambition leading to an unfeasible overall design, the biggest external factor was the different impact of sonic boom on the Concorde and the U.S. aircraft projects.
U.S. supersonic civil aircraft plans (top: Boeing 2707 later version; bottom: Lockheed L-2000)
A sonic boom is a phenomenon where an object flying supersonically in the atmosphere produces a "sharp explosion" heard by ground listeners within a certain range below it. Unlike the continuous thunder-like noise of a civilian aircraft moving away from and approaching, if a supersonic aircraft flies horizontally at a constant speed over a ground listener, the latter initially hears nothing, and then suddenly hears a single loud explosion (if your hearing is very good, you will find it is actually almost continuous overlapping sounds) like a thunderclap, followed by the typical jet engine sound. The ground perceivable intensity of the sonic boom is affected by the size of the flying object, Mach number (the multiple of supersonic speed), altitude, and flight mode (constant speed straight cruising or sudden acceleration/turning). The sonic boom of a gyroscope string and a bullet is considered harmless, while the sonic boom of an aircraft is a noise pollution that may have adverse effects on the elderly, pregnant women, and people with heart disease.
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The actual sonic boom effect of the Concorde
For the Concorde, which started with transatlantic routes, the sonic boom almost completely occurred over the sea, and apart from the impact on marine mammal populations, which still needs study, the harm to human activities can be directly ignored. However, for the American domestic supersonic aircraft project, which obviously focuses on the east-west coastal routes and must frequently cross the North American interior, it is different: although the inland states have long been derogatorily called "flyover zones," the daily "flyover" by the elites implicitly ignores, which is different from the daily lightning strike above one's head!
History of U.S. Civil Supersonic Flight Regulation
The sonic boom was theoretically predicted by the Soviet physics master Landau in 1945 (at that time humans could not lift objects larger than bullets to supersonic speeds), but it was not taken seriously in the West. However, the 1960s were the era of "Silent Spring" and the awakening of human environmental awareness, the world belongs to Cheng Li Hua, also to Ma Gang, but ultimately to Ye Wenjie.
In 1964, the FAA and the U.S. Air Force conducted the notorious "Bongo II" sonic boom experiment in Oklahoma, a state with major Native American reservations, using various military aircraft including the B-58 supersonic strategic bomber to create 1253 sonic booms around the capital city of Oklahoma City to test their impact on residential buildings and human health. This fascist civilian experiment caused 9594 complaints of building damage (broken window glass, wall cracks, tile falling off, etc.) and 4629 cases of injury complaints, most of which were dismissed by the government and courts in an extremely arrogant manner of "national interest" and "scientific sacrifice" (the "version update" of claiming compensation for burning coffee at McDonald's had not yet come), greatly boosting the evil image of sonic boom among the American public.
In the U.S. political farce, the inhumanity of the elite and the conspiracy theories of populism have always been mutually reinforcing. At that time, Polaroid Company had a "public intellectual" with high prestige among the patriotic rednecks - William Shuckly, who had once served as an edge document role in the Manhattan Project, and later always boasted about it, creating the image of a "genius who repented after developing nuclear weapons and devoted himself to environmental protection" and actively participated in the media. When the sonic boom issue became a hot topic, he led the creation of the "Anti-Sonic Boom Citizens' Alliance," wrote a small booklet (see the figure below) to stir up the situation, transforming a public movement that originally opposed the U.S. government's human experimentation into a conspiracy theory aimed at stifling normal research.
The highly sought-after "SST and Sonic Boom Handbook" portrayed the sonic boom as a weapon that could kill ten people in a step and leave no trace, essentially impossible to defend against or weaken from a physical perspective.
Although Shuckly's original field was optics, and he was obsessed with posting on the civilian media every day, he had actually left the front line of research. But he had a real Harvard physics doctorate and excellent writing skills, and his "participation in the development of the U.S. atomic bomb" persona intimidated many ordinary people, resulting in successfully causing a public panic in a field he actually didn't understand. These panic emotions were transmitted through the U.S. political system to the state senators who were completely ignorant of technology, eventually leading to the U.S. Senate voting 51:46 to reject any additional funding for supersonic civil aircraft projects in March 1971, setting a precedent for populist movements overturning major U.S. technological decisions.
Due to the lack of federal funding, the U.S. supersonic aircraft project was destined to die at birth (it was expected that the world supersonic aircraft market would be monopolized by Britain, France, and the Soviet Union), and Americans could freely do bad things, using their largest civilian aviation market position to shift the regulatory approach to "nobody can play." Under the name of implementing this decision, in 1973, the FAA issued CFR 91.817 "Sonic Boom for Civil Aircraft" and CFR 91.818 "Special Flight Authorization for Exceeding One Mach," which were the technical specifications, and these were the "land-based civil supersonic flight ban" abolished by Trump.
CFR 91.817 is as follows:
(1) No person shall operate a civil aircraft within the United States at a true flight Mach number greater than 1, unless the conditions and restrictions set forth in the exception authorization under CFR 91.818 are complied with;
(2) Except as provided in (1), no person shall operate a civil aircraft with a maximum operational speed exceeding one Mach at U.S. airports, unless (1) the crew members can obtain information containing flight restrictions ensuring that flights entering and leaving the United States do not cause sonic boom on the ground within the United States; and (2) the operator complies with the flight restrictions specified in (1), or complies with the conditions and restrictions set forth in the supersonic authorization under CFR 91.818.
The "exception" in CFR 91.818 was prepared for scientific research, and under the normal operation of the U.S. technical bureaucracy at that time, it could not be used to allow the Concorde to conduct commercial flights over land in the U.S. These two bans and CFR 91.819 "Supersonic Civil Aircraft Not Compliant with FAA 36 Part (Note: Noise)" and CFR 91.821 "Supersonic Civil Aircraft: Noise Limits" (here, noise refers to the internal and external noise that can be predicted by conventional aeronautical acoustics) together declared the death of supersonic passenger aircraft operating effectively in the airspace over the United States, effectively eliminating the potential market for the Concorde in U.S. airlines.
With the prohibition being ambiguously further written into the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex in 1985, the original Concorde became the only legal supersonic aircraft (the Tu-144 flights had already ceased), and subsequent generations and modified models such as the Concorde-B were eliminated.
Annex 16 of ICAO Volume I is about noise for civil aircraft, and the twelfth chapter that kills the Concorde modification has only three sentences.
How to view Trump's plan?
Trump signed an executive order in June to promote American supersonic aviation, requiring the FAA to abolish the land-based supersonic flight ban under CFR 91.817 by December 3, 2025, establish a new noise certification standard for supersonic civil aircraft by December 6, 2026, and eliminate other regulatory obstacles.
It seems accidental that "Dong Wang" suddenly remembered this, but it is actually logical.
On one hand, with the recent launch of China's sixth-generation fighter jets and catapult carriers, under the background of China's rapid advancement in defense science and technology and even obvious local superiority, the general anxiety of the U.S. aerospace and military circles has gradually transformed into a fascination with "new weapons changing the situation" similar to Hitler's in the late stages of World War II. This is not only directly reflected in Trump's decisions, but also reflected in the current U.S. capital's crazy investment in military startup projects: several major venture capitals that participated in the initial financing of the Boom Supersonic project, such as Caffeinated Capital and 8VC, have recently invested in multiple Silicon Valley and "Silicon Valley" military startups, including the notorious Net Technology Company Palantir and the Saronic unmanned boat project. This is essentially an indication that the U.S. military industry has deteriorated from "comprehensive offense" to "key offense."
This year, Trump made a "major purge" in the U.S. aerospace industry. His 2026 fiscal year budget proposal drastically cut NASA's routine research funds (from 7.3 billion dollars to 3.9 billion dollars, note that some AI-written articles online have serious errors in detail); but it is easy to notice that he cut mainly the expenditures that cannot be monetized in recent geopolitical struggles and are difficult to be used as a campaign slogan for his personal promotion, such as the MAVEN Mars orbiting probe, the Juno Jupiter orbiting probe, and basic research aerospace projects, as well as the 1818 research personnel positions supporting these projects. Among them, even 875 senior professionals with GS-15 level (roughly comparable to the deputy division level of Chinese civil servants or the fourth-level technical position) were included! (This is just a small part of Trump's final plan - to cut NASA staff by 33%)
In his budget report, Trump openly tore down the "first-rate development speed of U.S. aerospace" facade: "Although NASA's scientific missions have greatly expanded human understanding of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe, the huge expenses of more than 7 billion dollars annually covering over 100 tasks are unsustainable."
In his view, through the combination of the new fiscal year routine budget cuts and the "Big and Beautiful Act," redirecting a small amount of funds to "new" bombers, the resurgent sixth-generation fighters, and other key military projects, combined with the Republican Party's backers, who are relatively easy to manufacture "winning stories," the return to the moon plan and the supersonic civil aircraft plan, is a "win-win" strategy to save total funds and achieve short-term political achievements. Canceling the land-based civil supersonic flight ban regulation is an important policy tool to support this "re-direction" policy, and it aligns with the ideological political correctness of the Republican Party.
It is likely Trump's ultimate dream - supersonic Air Force One, but it is difficult for him to achieve during his lifetime
At the same time, Trump is a showy, greedy, and lacking the hypocritical qualities of traditional American politicians, a bankrupt internet celebrity. When analyzing any of his domestic and foreign policies, assuming that he has no personal interests and only considers the "collective" interests of the United States, the Republican Party, or the military-industrial complex is extremely unobjective and irrational.
Various signs indicate that the new executive order is still a way to reward supporters:
The founders of the venture capital companies Caffeinated Capital, Raymond Tonsing, and the main founder of 8VC, Joe Lonsdale, are all open Trump fans, and the latter also funded Palantir, which recently (using Trump as the profit transferred to them by the U.S. government) sponsored Trump's birthday parade.
At the same time, two long-time heavy-weight lobbyists of Boom Supersonic, the famous Utah cult member, far-right conspiracy theorist, and fanatical anti-China and anti-communist senator Mike Lee, once compared Trump extremely extravagantly to the "Moro Captain" of the fictional ancient American Indian pseudo-history of the Mormon religion in 2020; the other representative of Colorado State, Senator Cory Gardner, is also a Republican, although his views are more humane than the former, but he voted for 89% of Trump's supported bills during Trump's first term.
Clearing necessary regulatory obstacles for military-industrial complex projects invested in by his fans is a legitimate way for the president to please his fans. This is also one of the major advantages of the U.S. capitalist class's view of the American political system.
Will Trump's "liberalization" accelerate the development of the U.S. civil supersonic aviation industry?
This U.S. federal government (or the entire current "liberal democratic politics" of the United States) is so rotten and decayed that it can be seen from the White House website's exaggerated praise of Trump's various "achievements." This time is no exception - what a "historic nationwide effort", what a "re-establishment of America's undisputed leadership in the field of high-speed aviation", even going beyond the borders of the United States: "By eliminating decades of regulatory barriers and promoting supersonic advanced technology, President Trump is making the aviation industry great again!"
Why say these are just fantasies, nonsense, and boasting?
When the FAA issued CFR 91.817 "Sonic Boom for Civil Aircraft" to prohibit land-based supersonic flight 52 years ago, it also issued CFR 91.818 "Special Flight Authorization for Exceeding One Mach" for scientific research and special circumstances. In terms of wording, this regulation did not prohibit civil land-based supersonic applicants from repeating the same flight, nor did it prohibit them from profiting from such flights. In today's U.S. political professional bottom line has dropped to the level equivalent to Japan's whaling industry, as long as a method exists that can ensure supersonic flight "does not cause measurable sonic boom overpressure reaching the ground", even without revising the regulations, theoretically it can cite the fourth clause of this regulation for "demonstration" purposes to make the flight area exceed specific experimental areas, and define each flight as a "demonstration flight".
Indeed, such a method that can prevent measurable sonic boom overpressure from reaching the ground does exist.
BOOM company started in 2014, skipping the relatively sufficient basic research and clear market prospects of small supersonic private jets, directly launched a four-engine medium-sized aircraft that is very close to the Y-10 (80-seat, 50-meter length, 8000-kilometer range "cross-sea and transoceanic") without publishing results of sonic boom optimization design. It is now known that they did not achieve secret breakthroughs, but because they never intended to go down the arduous path of "sonic boom reverse design," instead adopting the same maritime (trans-Atlantic) violent supersonic as the Concorde and directly giving up on land, specifically using "Mach truncation" instead.
Example 1: An aircraft with a Mach number exceeding 2 flying horizontally at a constant speed, the sonic boom rays directed downward at each moment refract and form an arc-shaped sonic boom boundary on the ground. This boundary continues to push forward with the aircraft, forming a "sonic boom carpet" (similar to the formation principle of weld seams), and creates a "shadow zone" where no sonic boom is heard outside this "corridor."
"Mach truncation" refers to the phenomenon where the sonic boom is "diverted" before it reaches the ground. Due to the significant air gradient in the troposphere (the part of the atmosphere below the clouds in the figure), which is similar to a cocktail with increasing refractive index layers from a certain position, a beam of light shining diagonally into the glass may be gradually refracted increasingly "curved." Imagine this cocktail becoming extremely deep with countless layers, the beam of light will eventually be refracted out before hitting the bottom of the glass. Comparing the light beam to the acoustic pressure rays perpendicular to the Mach cone (determined by speed), we get the main reason for the left and right boundaries of the "sonic boom carpet" in the figure (the "shadow zone" outside the boundary does not hear the sonic boom).
If the aircraft's supersonic flight speed becomes very slow, just barely exceeding the sound barrier, forming a highly "spread" Mach cone (as shown in the following figure), this refraction also occurs directly below the aircraft, resulting in "Mach truncation":
Example 2: An aircraft with a Mach number slightly greater than 1 flying horizontally at a constant speed from a high altitude, all directions of the sonic boom rays are refracted back into the sky, none reaching the surface, the width of the sonic boom carpet is zero (the entire ground is a shadow zone), and "Mach truncation" occurs.
Theoretically, "Mach truncation" would completely eliminate the ground perceptible sonic boom, requiring no other low-sonic boom measures, and no need to modify the aircraft itself. The BOOM X1B aircraft adopted this scheme. Due to the collapse of the AS2 supersonic private jet project during the pandemic, currently, the only company in the U.S. pushing for a real model supersonic civil aircraft is BOOM; in other words, the U.S. supersonic civil aircraft projects do not actually need Trump's "liberalization."
Side note: "Mach truncation" is the best solution on paper for ground-perceptible sonic boom, but it is called "heresy" because it has strict upper limits on the cruise Mach number. Within the reasonable cruise altitude range of the aviation industry, the highest supersonic cruise speed is unlikely to exceed 1.3 Mach, and usually can only be controlled around 1.1 Mach. Meanwhile, the current Gulfstream advanced private jet cruise speed has already reached the subsonic limit of 0.96 Mach. Such a slight speed increase would entail significant energy loss due to continuous breaking of the sound barrier, which is not worth it and is pure gimmickry.
At the same time, although the sonic boom is mainly determined by the flying body, its overpressure propagation trajectory in the atmosphere is related to the atmosphere itself and is not entirely controllable by the flying object. Our air force and navy generally prohibit supersonic flight over densely populated areas based on the "three major disciplines and eight items of attention" principle, but due to this characteristic of the sonic boom, the phenomenon of hearing a sonic boom in urban areas can occasionally occur. For example, in November 2015, the "sky giant roar" heard in multiple areas of Chengdu, Sichuan Province, was confirmed by investigation to be the sonic boom caused by an aircraft from a certain unit of the aviation industry flying in the northwest airspace of Chengdu.
Under the determined altitude and cruise speed, whether "Mach truncation" can actually succeed is severely dependent on the geographical environment of the belt-shaped ground that the aircraft passes over, i.e., the "sonic boom carpet." This includes atmospheric temperature gradient, pressure gradient, wind speed type, the altitude of the ground or "listeners to avoid" itself (highlands, mountains, even skyscrapers), etc. These are not only uncontrollable by the aircraft company, but also not fully controllable by the airline. BOOM's approach of seeking technical compliance and irresponsibly neglecting the actual life and health of the American people is a new example of the truth of "capital leading to technological alienation" in Marxism.
Apes' cries stop, the light boat has passed thousands of mountains
Trump's executive order cannot accelerate the existing supersonic civil aircraft development in the U.S., but China's supersonic civil aircraft industry is rapidly catching up.
Units such as Northwestern Polytechnical University and Beihang University, known as the "Seven Defense Schools," are among the main units that are known to have explored this field earliest. Public information shows that the former had begun numerical simulations of linear theory-based fundamental science and aerodynamic layout design at least 15 years ago. The former dean of the School of Aeronautics, Professor Song, personally guided the establishment of a specialized research institution and foresightfully pointed out the four key technologies that need to be developed in this field - sonic boom prediction models, new engines, materials, and multidisciplinary design optimization. The latter had at least in 2015 conducted mature research and analysis of Western accumulated achievements, and the respected former editor-in-chief of the "Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica," Professor Zhu, personally published a long article in his busy schedule, summarizing the historical context and latest developments in supersonic civil aircraft, reducing sonic boom, and multidisciplinary optimization design from the 1960s to that point, playing a significant role in drawing industry attention.
Before the 18th National Congress, our country may have lagged behind the West by more than 50 years in this basic science of sonic boom prediction. But with the maturity of various technical and economic prerequisites in the new era and the entry of related fields into the national strategy, under the hard work of multiple units such as NPU, the Aerodynamics Institute of Aviation Industry, and the China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics, not only was the sonic boom prediction technology based on linear theory quickly overcome, but also the nonlinear propagation of sonic boom was conquered within about five years, reaching the level achieved by the West in the 1990s, which has not seen significant subsequent progress.
In 2018, the sonic boom team of the Aerodynamics Institute of Aviation Industry collaborated with Zero One Space Co., Ltd. to conduct ground sonic boom characteristic measurement research based on the suborbital rocket-powered vehicle OS-X0 launched by the latter, obtaining ground sonic boom signals in China's real atmospheric environment, filling the historical gap of no measured data in this field; in 2023, the Beijing Aeronautical Research Institute of Aviation Industry further solved the critical "focused sonic boom" prediction problem for supersonic flight under non-uniform straight-line cruising conditions of the aircraft, making the sonic boom prediction theory more complete and practical.
In application theory and verification, Professor Han's optimization design team at NPU not only achieved sonic boom prediction and shaping in real atmosphere, but also combined the inverse design theory based on linear models with proxy model optimization, achieving dual improvements in cruise performance and noise reduction, and the characteristics of the new aircraft scheme, including ground perceptible sound levels, are rapidly approaching the standards proposed by NASA.
In May 2024, Sun, the former chief engineer of the J-15, and the vice director of the Science and Technology Committee of AVIC (Beihang University alumnus) published "Research on the Development Strategy of Aerospace Engineering Technology for the Next 20 Years" in "China Engineering Sciences," listing supersonic passenger aircraft as a key direction, focusing on low-sonic boom full-aircraft optimization, variable-cycle engines, and intelligent composite material repair technology, pointing out the goal of achieving the unity of commercial feasibility and environmental (noise) feasibility.
The "Canghai Shixiong" supersonic passenger aircraft design scheme of Lingkong Tianhang
The "Tianmusan No. 10" supersonic private jet concept scheme of Tianmusan Laboratory
I know nothing about the so-called "COMAC C949" fabricated by foreign media and don't want to discuss it, and I suggest readers remain highly vigilant against such "positive news" originating from abroad and their domestic disseminators. However, it is known that when the "national team" steadily advances in basic work, private enterprises have played a flexible and mobile "pioneer" role in exploring the supersonic civil aircraft field in China.
Chengdu Lingkong Tianhang, which is biased towards the aerospace route, has developed the "Yunhang" series of hypersonic glider configurations with four times the speed of sound, successfully testing the first conceptual prototype in October 2024; in December 2024, the ramjet engine test flight was successful, and the complete full-scale aircraft design scheme has been released, with plans for the first flight in 2027. At the same time, the renowned Tianmusan Laboratory, in collaboration with Beihang University and COMAC, designed the technically more mature "Tianmusan No. 10" two-times supersonic private jet with low drag and low sonic boom characteristics, whose 1/18 scale prototype completed its low-speed first flight in Hebei on June 30, 2025.
Through utilizing private investment to test, China is actually walking a path of simultaneously advancing both "looking up at the stars" and "keeping feet on the ground." In fact, from the perspective of surpassing technology, supersonic civil aircraft is a highly specialized technical tool that depends heavily on global regional economic integration, and it is unlikely to become a substitute for subsonic civil aircraft. A MAGA regime-controlled economy that is self-isolated, closed, and destroying globalization and transnational trade and cultural exchanges is constantly relative declining, and it is impossible to lead the direction of this tool, but it still has the ability to cause turmoil in the world for a period of time, delaying the arrival of an era when this technology can soar in the skies and benefit human civilization. In this case, tackling key technologies and allowing private capital to "test the waters" on project models may be the optimal solution at present.
We cannot change the world alone, but we can do our part. Under the current international environment, China has chosen a pragmatic development path that fits the technical and market prospects in this field, which is more meaningful than the "arms race" and "achievement projects" of the current U.S. government.
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