Aviation: Boom Town

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Some folks in Oklahoma City thought it was just one aggravation after another. One woman complained that her furniture was shrinking. Another said that her bra strap had snapped eight times in one day. A farmer north of town found his hens uninterested in such mundane matters as egg laying. And someone threatened to chuck a bomb at Mayor Jack Wilkes.

The ostensible cause of all this was eight sonic booms every 24 hours, day after day, week after week—a pattern of thunderclaps for the area's 750,000 inhabitants who have become guinea pigs in a six-month Federal Aviation Agency test. The test is to determine the effect upon groundlings of flights by supersonic transport aircraft, which the U.S. is about ready to develop, when they start crisscrossing the country in the early 1970s.

Since the test began one morning last month, when an F-104 jet from nearby Tinker Air Force Base sonic-boomed over the city, the FAA has been: haled into federal court on two injunction suits, one filed by Plumber Woodrow Bussey, who finally fled to Arizona "for the duration"; named in 75 damage claims totaling $10,067; the recipient of a death threat against national FAA Administrator Najeeb Halaby; deluged with more than 4,300 phone calls. Added to these was a peculiar complaint from the owner of a general store in nearby Seward, Okla. Lately, it seems, a family of skunks have established residence under the store—and every time a sonic boom goes off, the striped creatures "retaliate in the only way they know how."

But not everyone in Oklahoma City wanted to ban the boom. One who does not is Stanley Draper Sr., managing director of the Chamber of Commerce.

Draper hopes that supersonic transports will make the city a world trade center, and last week was in Nigeria trying to drum up business. Other boom boomers are the city's two newspapers, which have printed no fewer than eleven editorials rapping citizens for grousing about the noise, and Mayor Wilkes, who helped block a move by the city council to condemn the test. And there are several working girls who complained, after bad weather had canceled a 7 a.m. boom one day, that they had overslept.

Well, the FAA wanted reactions, and it is bound to get more. At week's end there were five months and 980 booms to go.