US: Congress eyes future of supersonic travel

The US Congress is showing an appetite for revisiting the decades-long ban on supersonic travel over land. Both the House and Senate versions of FAA reauthorisation bills include measures directing the FAA to study the regulations surrounding supersonic travel to see if they could be updated. “It is important to create bias for action…so we can lead to certification and safe operation over the domestic US,” said representative Mark Sanford who sponsored the measure as an amendment to the House FAA reauthorisation bill. Civil supersonic travel over land in the US has been prohibited since March 1973. But years of research surrounding sonic booms and the advancement of technologies are giving rise to questions about what could be done to facilitate supersonic travel. <br/>