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FAA proposal: Supersonic airliners can fly over US cities if they’re quiet

Chimera readability score 71 out of 100, Expert reading level.

A long-standing ban on commercial supersonic flights over the United States would be overturned in a new rule proposed by the US Federal Aviation Administration. That could pave the way for the possible return of commercial supersonic airliners—as long as such aircraft can reduce the ground-level impacts of their sonic booms.
The FAA originally banned overland supersonic flights by civil aircraft in 1973, following US military tests involving supersonic flights over US cities such as Oklahoma City, Chicago, and St. Louis in the 1960s. But the Trump administration has championed the repeal of the ban to pave the way for supersonic airliners that could operate without disruptive sonic booms. So the FAA’s new rulemaking action on June 30, 2026, follows the direction of an executive order issued by President Trump on June 6, 2025.
The newly proposed rule would replace the 53-year prohibition with an interim “noise-based” certification standard requiring any sonic boom overpressure at the surface to be kept below 0.11 pounds per square foot. That proposed standard is based on the Colorado-based startup Boom Supersonic having demonstrated quiet Mach cutoff flights with its XB-1 aircraft—harnessing specific atmospheric conditions while flying just beyond supersonic speeds at higher altitudes so that the aircraft’s shockwaves are refracted upward into the atmosphere rather than traveling to the ground.
For comparison, the Concorde supersonic airliner that flew commercial transatlantic flights between 1976 and 2003 created a sonic boom overpressure equivalent to 1.94 pounds per square foot when flying at a speed of Mach 2 at an altitude of 52,000 feet.
A NASA fact sheet suggests that “some public reaction could be expected between 1.5 and 2 pounds” but rules out damage to buildings and other structures at one pound of overpressure. It further explains that humans have experienced sonic boom overpressure between 20 and 144 pounds without injury when supersonic aircraft flew at altitudes below 100 feet.
However, not everyone is sold on this proposed standard for allowing overland supersonic flights. Dan Rutherford, senior director at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation, told Aviation Week that the overpressure metric was previously discarded by United Nations experts in 2014 because “it doesn’t actually measure loudness or annoyance.”

Sentinel — Human

Confidence

The text displays strong signs of human journalistic authorship, characterized by logical structure, specialized knowledge integration, and the use of balanced perspectives to frame a complex regulatory debate.

Signals Detected
low severity: Erratic sentence length variance and natural flow; effective use of complex dependent clauses.
low severity: The text successfully integrates disparate facts (FAA rule, specific aircraft data, NASA fact sheet, expert critique) into a cohesive narrative structure without mechanical transition repetition.
low severity: Arguments are structurally sound and lead logically from premise (the ban) to proposal (the rule) to justification (the math/critique). No immediate, obvious template matching or verbatim repetition.
low severity: Specific data points (e.g., 1.94 psf for Concorde, 0.11 psf proposed standard) and named sources (Boom Supersonic, Dan Rutherford/ICCT, NASA fact sheet) suggest grounding in real-world knowledge.
Human Indicators
The integration of specific, non-obvious data points (e.g., the precise 0.11 psf threshold and the contrast with Concorde's 1.94 psf) points toward research or meticulous reporting.
The inclusion of a direct counterpoint from an expert (Dan Rutherford/ICCT) that challenges the primary metric demonstrates nuanced editorial practice rather than pure aggregation.