Environment: SST: Boon or Boom-Doggie?

The supersonics are coming−as surely as tomorrow. You will be flying one version or another by 1980 and be trying to remember what the great debate was all about.

−Najeeb Halaby

What the great debate is all about is whether the U.S. supersonic transport, a sleek, needle-shaped bird programmed to fly above the weather at 21 times the speed of sound, will be a boon, as Pan American World Airways President Halaby predicts, or if, in the words of Ecology Buff Arthur Godfrey, it will be "a boom-doggie." To a growing number of critics,...

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