Supersonic Flight Routing in Consideration of Secondary Sonic Booms

This paper discusses the issue of secondary sonic booms (SSBs) in the context of civil supersonic flight operations. It presents a ray-tracing methodology to calculate sonic-boom impact locations for realistic flight routes and realistic atmospheric conditions. Secondary-boom footprints are calculated for flight missions between several city pairs in weather of all seasons. These capabilities form the basis for automated, realistic, sonic-boom-compliant flight routing.