Early fighter pilots were sometimes called knights of the air, a reflection of medieval times when knights used blunted lances in jousting tournaments to dismount competitors from their horses. Now, jet-borne jousting is combating supersonic shockwaves, hopefully enough to lessen the resulting sonic boom heard on the ground. Gulfstream Aerospace and NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center have teamed in a project called Quiet Spike to investigate the suppression of sonic booms. The project centers around a retractable, 24-foot-long lance-like spike mounted on the nose of NASA Dryden's F-15B research testbed aircraft. The spike, made primarily of composite materials, creates three...