Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Mysterious sonic booms in Tucson

Boom! Boom!

Mysterious sonic booms have rattled some windows and nerves in Tucson in the last 24 hours. The last one that people were Tweeting about on Twitter was around 8 p.m. I was in our relatively soundproof radio/TV building and didn't hear a thing.

The sonic booms have been traced to supersonic aircraft doing training exercises. The aircraft is from Luke Air Force Base west of Phoenix. The Air Force base in Tucson has a limited inventory of supersonic aircraft but were not involved in any exercises at the time the booms were heard.

Due to the cold weather, sonic booms are louder and can travel farther. That may explain why they were so loud and rattled some windows as well as nerves.

It wasn't an earthquake or God farting. It was an airplane!