SST: Boon or Boom-Doggie?

The supersonics are coming -as surely as tomorrow. You will be flying one version or another by 1980 and be trying to remember what the great debate was all about.

-Najeeb Halaby

What the great debate is all about is whether the U.S. supersonic transport, a sleek, needle-shaped bird programmed to fly above the weather at 21 times the speed of sound, will be a boon, as Pan American World Airways President Halaby predicts, or if, in the words of Ecology Buff Arthur Godfrey, it will be "a boom-doggie." To a growing number of critics, the latter seems likely.

While chairing a joint congressional subcommittee hearing on the SST two weeks ago, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire labeled the program a waste. At issue was whether Congress should appropriate another $290 million to help industry develop the aircraft. The Government has already spent more than $700 million, and plans to spend a total of at least $1.3 billion. Along with the spiraling cost, Senator Proxmire was angered by the Department of Transportation's failure to present reports on the ecological effects of the SST to Russell Train, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Bang-Zone. Like Proxmire, ecologists are concerned about the potential threat of the SST to the environment. Many of their misgivings are documented in the S/S/T and Sonic Boom Handbook, a hot-selling (150,000 copies to date) paperback edited by William Shurcliff, director of a pressure group called the Citizens League Against the Sonic Boom. The Handbook contends that a single SST, flying from New York to California, would leave a "bang-zone" 50 miles wide by 2,000 miles long. But some tests indicate that this bang at SST's operational height of 60,000 ft. will resemble distant thunder rather than a full-scale sonic boom.

While SST flights may be banned from populated areas, some ecologists fear that economic necessity may reverse this pattern. If this happens, they say, sonic booms generated as SSTs fly at speeds in excess of the speed of sound could upset people who do delicate work (brain surgeons) and may also harm persons with nervous ailments.

More ominously, some scientists have warned that SSTs could envelop the earth in a "global gloom" by dumping water vapor into the stratosphere, where it could hang suspended for long periods of time. Presidential Adviser Russell Train himself warns that a fleet of 500 SSTs flying at 65,000 ft. for a period of years could raise stratospheric water content by as much as 50% to 100%.

"This could be very significant," Train told the Proxmire subcommittee, "because observations indicate the water vapor content of the stratosphere has already increased about 50% over the last five years." A water-vapor blanket, Train contends, could lead to greater ground-level heat and hamper the formation of ozone that shields the earth from the sun's ultraviolet rays.

Proponents of the SST point out that the aircraft represents a technological advance in aviation, with valuable spin-offs for other segments of the economy. They also stress that every effort is being made to make the aircraft environmentally compatible. A major blast against SST critics was delivered recently in a trade journal article by Wayne W. Parrish, aviation editor of Ziff-Davis Publishing. Said Parrish of the yet-to-be-flown U.S. SST: "There is nothing quite so convenient as a target that hasn't been seen or heard."

Atlantic River. All the same, SST defenders have still not offered convincing proposals for dealing with the supersonics' most pressing problem: ear-shattering "sideline" noise generated at takeoff and landing. According to one estimate, the airport roar of a single SST will match that of five jumbo jets. Proposed solutions to sideline noise and sonic boom have thus far been less than encouraging. Some scientists have proposed recycling jet engine exhausts to reduce noise. Others have suggested powerful electrostatic fields to ionize and brush aside air molecules before they can pile up and form boom-producing shock waves.

In spite of all the flack, the SST program last week received a substantial boost when the House Appropriations Committee approved the $290 million requested for further development. Congress, reflecting on the millions already sunk into the aircraft, may well vote for continued, if reduced funding. But whether the SST will, in the words of Halaby, "turn the Atlantic into a river and the Pacific into a lake," or turn both into an ecological quagmire, remains to be seen. At about $40 million per plane (v. $23 million per jumbo jet), the U.S. SST has also left many people wondering whether such huge sums should be spent merely to get a relatively small number of travelers across the Atlantic and Pacific a few hours faster. Elwood Quesada, who was the Federal Aviation Agency's first administrator and is currently an American Airlines board member, frankly told the congressional subcommittee: "The feeling among airline executives is to wish that the SST would go away."

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