I recall the very first time I experienced this, I was standing on the flight deck & the word came over the intercom that there was a "Tom Cat" preparing to break the sound barrier & that he was currently 7 miles out. I remember thinking ok, 7 miles, it'll be a "little while" before he gets here so, I started intently watching the sky at a fairly high altitude, only to be rudely awakened about 30 seconds later by the F-14 breaking the sound barrier only a couple of hundred yards out from the ship @ "flight deck level" which is only about 65 ft off of the water. I had been looking way to high to see it coming & the blast scared me to death, it felt like someone punched me in the chest!!! LOL

Great picture, thanks for sharing!

God bless!

Eric  AKA Believer

JimSGreene@xxxxxxx wrote:

Check out the Hyperlink for more info and pictures  More of these pictures
 

Supersonic F/A-18C Hornet

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Subject: Fwd: Fw: Supersonic F/A-18C Hornet
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 21:02:17 EST
From: LISADAVEFOUN10@xxxxxxx
To: JimSGreene@xxxxxxx

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Subject: Fw: Supersonic F/A-18C Hornet
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 18:18:33 -0600
From: "Mark" <imo66@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lisadavefoun10@xxxxxxx>

 ----- Original Message -----From: jimnkelliTo: Undisclosed-Recipient:;Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 5:10 PMSubject: Fw: Supersonic F/A-18C Hornet  ----- Original Message -----From: Schlosser, Brendan FTo: 'hippewins@xxxxxxx' ; 'Voth Nancy' ; 'Schlosser, Mom/Dad' ; 'Johnson, Danie' ; 'McClanahan's'Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 4:27 PMSubject: FW: Supersonic F/A-18C Hornet   Brendan Schlosser
Team Lead, Structural Integrity Branch
Structures & Materials Division, AED
US Army AMCOM
256-705-9665

Subject: FW: Supersonic F/A-18C Hornet

 Through the viewfinder of his camera, Ensign John Gay saw the fighter plane drop from the sky heading toward the port side of his aircraft carrier Constellation. At 1,000 feet, the pilot had dropped the F/A-18C Hornet to increase his speed to 750 mph, vapor flickering off the curved surfaces of the plane.

In the precise moment a cloud in the shape of a farm-fresh egg formed around the Hornet 200 yards from the carrier, its engines rippling the Pacific Ocean just 75 feet below, Gay heard an explosion and snapped his camera shutter once.

"I clicked the same time I heard the boom, and I knew I had it," Gay said.

What he had was a technically meticulous depiction of the sound barrier being broken July 7, 1999, somewhere on the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan. Sports Illustrated, Brills Content and Life ran the photo.  The photo recently took first prize in the science and technology division in the World Press Photo 2000 contest, which drew more than 42,000 entries worldwide.

"All of a sudden, in the last few days, I've been getting calls from everywhere about it again. It's kind of neat," he said, in a telephone interview from his station in Virginia Beach, Va.

A naval veteran of 12 years, Gay, 38, manages a crew of eight assigned to take intelligence photographs from the high-tech belly of an F-14 Tomcat, the fastest fighter in the U.S. Navy. In July, Gay had been part of a Joint Task Force Exercise as the Constellation made its way to Japan. Gay selected his Nikon 90 S, one of the five 35 mm cameras he owns. He set his 80-300 mm zoom lens on 300 mm, set his shutter speed at 1/1000 of second with an aperture setting of F5.6.

"I put it on full manual, focus and exposure," Gay said. "I tell young photographers who are into automatic everything, you aren't going to get that shot on auto. The plane is too fast. The camera can't keep up."

At sea level a plane must exceed 741 mph to break the sound barrier, or the speed at which sound travels. The change in pressure as the plane outruns all of the pressure and sound waves in front of it is heard on the ground as an explosion or sonic boom. The pressure change condenses the water in the air as the jet passes these waves. Altitude, wind speed, humidity, the shape and trajectory of the plane; all of these affect the breaking of this barrier. The slightest drag or atmospheric pull on the plane shatters the vapor oval like fireworks as the plane passes through. Everything on July 7 was perfect, he said. "You see this vapor flicker around the plane that gets bigger and bigger. You get this loud boom, and it's instantaneous.  The vapor cloud is there, and then it's not there. It's the coolest thing you have ever seen."
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