Loud bang of unknown origin heard over England

[Spritely]

Same thing has happened twice in AL in the past couple years and with the same explanation. I didn't know AL had tons of super-fast sound-barrier-breaking jet action. The worst part was listening to the newspeople read the wikipedia article for "sonic boom".

I lived in Chattanooga, TN for a while; near the tn/alabama/georgia border and we heard them all the time when they were on training runs; there's an airfield in north-west GA or something. more than once a year but it was still a jolting enough experience that it freaked you out. Once we had one early morning on a weekend and my ex was walking down his stairs at the time. He fell and a picture on the wall fell and broke. He and his family thought someone had crashed into the house because of how much shaking went on. That particular one caused a lot of trouble because they were flying too low over a metropolitan area. At least in the states there's regulations on how low they can be in populated areas because it can be a big disruption.

edit: I was just on the phone with my mom and the deal down there was that they were developing a new plane down there. They've finished it now and no longer have to deal with it. She did say that another sound that can scare the crap out of you is when they hit an air pocket in a rock quarry. The result is nearly the same as breaking the sound barrier.

[kleinlax21]

It was a distress signal transmitted. Distress signals on that frequency would generally warrant the response that it did.

Yes, I understand this. I was just saying that it's entirely possible to accidentally indicate you are in a hijack situation without transmitting a single word over an emergency frequency using your radio; I was showing it was possible to do this using a transponder, which operates completely independent of the vocal transmit/receive radio communication system.

[Trigg]

Probably just the Doctor coming back from an adventure. Bring on the new season!

Damn if only the tardis could make an entrance like that. Not that the screeching hand brake is bad, just if it was a sonic boom, you could have such a great visual entrance to acompany it! Massive shockwave, crackling lightning, ground shaking! would be an epic apearance of the blue box!

[Deleted]

Yes, I understand this. I was just saying that it's entirely possible to accidentally indicate you are in a hijack situation without transmitting a single word over an emergency frequency using your radio; I was showing it was possible to do this using a transponder, which operates completely independent of the vocal transmit/receive radio communication system.

Ahh, appologies - My misunderstanding.

[Deleted]

heard nothing in Devon :L

[kleinlax21]

Ahh, appologies - My misunderstanding.

It's all good! I didn't mean to sound like an arrogant know-it-all in my reply; it's just difficult describing an aircraft's systems with any degree of depth over an internet forum

[Evil Inside]

Aliens.


=o]


On a serious note, Didnt a similar thing happen in a small town, earlier this month? The people were recording the loud bangs/booms and no one could figure out where they were coming from or what they were. I dont recall if it was in the USA or the UK. I wonder if it has anything to do with all the crazy earth quakes in the past couple of days.

I wonder whats going on with the earth?!

It was in the USA. And those turned out to be really small earthquakes, that's the official explanation anyway.

[lokithor]

Reaper horns