A flight research overview of the Waveforms and Sonicboom Perception and Response Project, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's pilot program for sonic boom community response research

Abstract

To support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) ongoing effort to bring supersonic commercial travel to the aerospace industry NASA Dryden, in cooperation with other government and industry organizations, conducted a flight research experiment to identify the methods, tools, and best practices for a large-scale sonic boom community human response test. The name of the project was Waveforms and Sonicboom Perception and Response (WSPR). Such tests go toward building a dataset that governing agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration and International Civil Aviation Organization will use to establish regulations for acceptable sound levels of overland sonic booms. This paper focuses on NASA’s role in the project on essential elements of community response testing including recruitment, survey methods, instrumentation systems, flight planning, and operations. Objectives of the testing included exposing a residential community with sonic boom doses designed to simulate those produced by the next generation of commercial supersonic aircraft. The sonic booms were recorded with an instrumentation array that spanned the community. Human response data was collected using multiple survey methods, and was correlated to acoustic metrics from the sonic booms. The project resulted in lessons-learned and the findings of appropriate methods necessary to implement a successful large-scale test.