Sonic boom heard over Washington is a rare sound with a rich history

By BEN FINLEY
Associated Press

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — People living in and around the nation’s capital experienced a rare, if startling, sound: A sonic boom. The U.S. military had dispatched a fighter jet on Sunday to intercept an unresponsive business plane that was flying over restricted airspace. The Air Force gave the F-16 permission to fly faster than the speed of sound to catch up with it. The result was a thunderous rumble. The U.S. government rarely gives permission to civilian aircraft to travel that fast. The last supersonic aircraft to carry passengers was the Concorde. It stopped flying in 2003.