Semi OT- Loudest jet ever?

Yeah - I also consider them pretty quiet compared to other things that fly in and out of my airspace...

What'd you say?..

I used to have to enter the test cells with the engine at max to check for leaks during F-101 PV testing when I was at GE...try being in a closed room with one.

I think there's one down at Cal City, where I used to skydive. I'd say a Harrier is still worse.

Concur.

My opinion, based purely on personal experience, goes to the A-6, either Intruder or Prowler. On a carrier you tend to learn to identify launching aircraft by the sound and vibration. Our Tomcats were loud enough, but it was smooth with a medium pitch, even with A/B's lit. S-3's were...well, they didn't call them "Whistling Shitcans" for nothing, very high pitched, but again, smooth. A-6's on the other hand....holy christ, the noise and vibration were incredible; they would literally shake the whole ship, and you could hear them regardless of where you were. Phantoms would run a close second I think. If I ever heard a Blackbird I would probably change my opinion, but....

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. --Leonardo Da Vinci EAA # 729686 delete the word spam from email addy

Don't confuse 'small' with 'quiet'. I've been near plenty of jets from the 50's to the present day and this is still the only one that made me feel sick with the noise.

Duncan

Intruder or Prowler.

I spent a lot of time around TF30's, F100's, J-58's and J-52's running on open-air test stands. The J52 wasn't the loudest in terms of pressure level, but its pitch was distinctive, and to many who worked with me, the most intrusive. I can believe that 2 of them on an A-6 would shake the fillings out of your teeth.

My personal story of loudest noise ever has to be a J-58, a J-52, and a TF30 all running simultaneously in adjacent test stands, with the TF30 and the J-58 going into afterburning during schduled portions of their test programs. When the maximum power levels peridiodically coincided, ear protectors barely attentuated the noise, and nothing stopped the vibration of your internal organs.

Remove "spamkill" from my e-mail address to reply.

I can beat that - CFM-56 in the test cells at Evendale; undergoing stall certification testing...run the engine up to max, feed some nitrogen into the Ps3 line to force a stator mis-schedule...WHAM.

The containment walls between those test cells are 16 foot thick reinforced concrete, if I recall. I was working in the next cell...the walls shook enough to knock things over. Fortunately, they had to do post stall borescope inspections before continuing, so even though the testing continued into my shift, there was about an hour or so between BANGs...

Good point. Are we talking 'absolute dBs' here, or the more subjective "My goodness, that's loud" kinda thing. Remember that any moving thing has a natural harmony that will affect people in different ways. Some will barely notice it, while others may be made physically sick, that feeling getting confused with the whole 'loudness' thing. And if it's running in a test cell, all the harmonics and perceived noise etc will be much different again.

In my limited experience (not too much mil aviation around here!) the F-111 makes about as much noise as I'd like to listen to for any length of time. Give me a Centaurus or Merlin any day - now that's sweeet music. :-)

RobG

Jeff C wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Yeah, I think the same for me. I saw one take off from London once. Freakin insane loud!

TF

When we flew the first production Eurofighter Typhoon at Manching in 2002 the Luftwaffe put up a recon Phantom as a chase 'plane. Now Typhoons are loud but the Phantom shook all my fillings out and made the Typhoon sound like it had electric motors in it...

...but I still think a Harrier in the hover is a noisy dirty little beast. We always had to have the runway swept after they were doing their stuff.

I think the loudest I ever heard was an SR-71 at the test stand in Okinawa one night. This was in the summer of 1980. The SR-71 was chained to what looked like 8x8x8 foot concrete blocks. The visuals were really cool, too. The first time I ever saw "shock diamonds" up close and personal. Talk about rattling your fillings! I'm not sure if it was the noise, the visuals or just being that close to an SR-71, but it gave me a serious adrenaline rush! Don McIntyre Clarksville, TN

before they

The loudest single aircraft I've ever heard was a DeHavilland Vampire. When I heard it first without seeing the airplane taxi, I thought it was some kind of siren. Another loud jet for its size was the A-37. They didn't call them Tweety birds for nothing! The MD ANG had them when I was a kid and rarely flew them over Baltimore because they were too loud! The loudest demonstration I saw was when the DC ANG flew a formation of F-105's at Andrews AFB just before their retirement in

Gene DiGennaro Baltimore, Md.

Seen plenty of aircraft at airshows, and the one that I always wished wouldn't fly was the Harrier. Perhaps it's my own physiology, but I would feel ill listening to one of them hover/fly.

Noisy - yes. And they are *incredibly* dirty... Anyone who is modelling a Harrier is advised to spray the rear end aft of the hot nozzles with a black sooty weathering mixture - so thick that it almost leaves the serials unreadable. Although they were supposed to be cleaned every month, we could never get them *quite* clean and the successive layers of soot soon built up.

The centreline of the belly should be an assortment of oily streaks as well. Harriers leak engine oil and fuel from *everywhere* ! We used to say that a Harrier that doesn't leak is a Harrier that is empty!

Even at idle, standing in front of a Harrier is no picnic for the eardrums.

Nope...it's not just you...

But are jets the loudest airplane engines ever? Sure, with afterburners they're pretty loud, but in my (limited) experience [1], a big piston engine is a lot louder than a turboshaft that generates the same power.

- RR once designed an engine that was supposed to generate 30% of its power as thrust from the exhaust pipes (the Crecy). It wasn't successful: using that energy to drive a turbocharger proved to produce more power. And less noise: the Crecy opened its exhaust valves very early, while the fuel mixture was still burning. During tests, the engine could be heard 25 km from the workshop. In comparison, a Griffon was quiet.

- The Lycoming XR-7755 (a 36-cilinder, 127-litre, 5000-bhp radial) was even louder than the Crecy. Concrete walls around the test bench actually crumbled under the noise.