Boom!
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- March
- 9
A lot of people are talking about the mysterious boom that was apparently heard in southern Westchester late Saturday night and reported here on lohud.com.
I didn’t hear it in White Plains, but hearing about it made me feel kind of homesick for my days as an Air Force brat. Growing up on isolated bases in the 1960s and early 1970s, we got to see F-4 Phantoms and F-104 Starfighters streaking across the sky virtually every day, and sonic booms were just part of the show.
At Hahn Air Base in Germany, they’d start warming them up at 4 a.m. You learned to sleep through the racket. Sometimes in the summer we kids would camp out in the woods at the edge of the flight line and watch them take off and land all night. It was cool to see the afterburn coming from their tails; it wasn’t so cool when the Air Police would catch us and turn us over to our parents.
My dad used to take us to the hangars once in a while while he was working, and GIs would let us sit in the cockpits if there were no officers around. At Hahn the hangars were covered with growing grass so they couldn’t be spotted by Soviet spy planes.
We moved to White Plains when my dad retired in 1974, and for a long time we had trouble sleeping because we didn’t hear sonic booms or the roar of jet engines. Amazing what you get used to living with.
My colleague, Jorge Fitz-Gibbon, is chasing after the boom story today – apparently someone in Nanuet heard one early this morning. If you heard anything, give him a call at 914-694-5016. If not, read all about it tomorrow on lohud.com or in The Journal News.
This entry was posted
on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:19 pm by Rich Liebson. 
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