Some practical difficulties in assessing community response to low-amplitude sonic booms

Abstract

NASA Langley Research Center has been engaged for several years in planning tests of public acceptance of exposure to low-amplitude sonic booms that will be created by its Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) X-plane design. Estimation of a dosage-response relationship for the prevalence of high annoyance with sonic booms is a key part of this testing. The need to credibly assess prompt, single-event responses within carpet boom corridors extending along hundreds of miles of flight tracks and their linkage to sonic boom sound levels at respondents' homes is a large part of the challenge of establishing such a relationship. As many as tens of thousands of contact attempts and thousands of completed interviews must be achieved within short time periods. Conventional social survey approaches to measuring cumulative noise exposure and the prevalence of high annoyance in airport environs are ill-suited to such purposes. ADS-B-based, Internet-enabled flight tracking and impulse noise measurement, as well as high speed interviewing methods, are currently under investigation as potential solutions to difficulties in synchronizing interviews with arrival times of shock waves at residences of exposed populations.