Republic XF-84H Thunderscreech traveled faster than the speed of sound even at idle thrust, producing a continuous visible sonic boom that radiated laterally from the propellers for hundreds of yards. The shock wave was actually powerful enough to knock a man down; an unfortunate crew chief who was inside a nearby C-47 was severely incapacitated during a 30-minute ground run. Coupled with the already considerable noise from the subsonic aspect of the propeller and the T40's dual turbine sections, the aircraft was notorious for inducing severe nausea and headaches among ground crews. In one report, a Republic engineer suffered a seizure after close
Shock wave be: Some other terms The abruptness of change in the features of the medium, that characterize shock waves, can be viewed as a phase transition: the pressure-time diagram of a supersonic object propagating shows how the transition induced by a shock wave is analogous to a "dynamic phase transition". When an object (or disturbance) moves faster than the information can propagate into the surrounding fluid, then the fluid near the disturbance cannot react or "get out of the way" before the disturbance arrives. In a shock wave the properties of the fluid (density, pressure, temperature, flow velocity, Mach number) change