Fighter jets' sonic boom rattles Jersey coast

An F-35C and an F-18 that were conducting supersonic testing Thursday may have caused the sonic boom felt across much of New Jersey, naval officials said.

The jets came from the naval air station in Patuxent River, Md. The public affairs office there said that military aircraft routinely conduct test flights offshore in an area called the "Test Track," which "parallels the entire coast of the Delmarva Peninsula.

"Test aircraft from the naval air station execute supersonic flights almost daily in the test track, and most of these sonic booms are never felt on land," said spokeswoman Connie Hempel. "However, under certain atmospheric conditions there is an increased potential to hear the sound."

She said the tests are done to evaluate aircrafts in service.

From Long Island, N.Y., to Cape May, residents on Thursday felt the earth move about 1 p.m. as a series of shocks rattled windows through a broad swath of the Garden State.

"We haven't seen anything to suggest there has been an earthquake," said U.S. Geological Survey research geophysicist William Yeck. "We have been getting a lot of calls and see signals consistent with a sonic boom."

The Federal Aviation Administration directed calls to the Air National Guard which has its 177th Fighter Wing based in Atlantic City. Calls to the base were not immediately returned.

According to a report on shorenewstoday.com, the National Guard jets were not flying Thursday.

Bill Godfrey, a real estate agent in Ocean City, said he was returning from a fishing trip about 30 miles off the coast when he and his friends heard eight of the booms as they got closer to the shoreline.

"It was awesome," Godfrey said. "We never even thought they were an earthquake because you hear this all the time around here...it's usually just jets traveling at the speed of sound or something like that."

Contact Sam Wood at 215-854-2796 or samwood@phillynews.com. Follow @samwoodiii on Twitter.