AircraftNews.Com

On Oct. 1, 1969, the Concorde 001, a joint British-French venture, traveled faster than the speed of sound for the very first time. It was the aircraft’s 45th test flight and it held Mach 1.05 for 9 minutes at 36,000 feet and 75 miles from Toulouse, France.

It wasn’t the first commercial aircraft to break the sound barrier, that was the Russian Tu 144 which had beaten the Concord by a few months but it was the Concord which went on to provide many years of commercial supersonic passenger flight.

Supersonic flight was for long only a dream but in 1974 Chuck Yeager (whom I have shaken hands with and is a real man who likes hunt’n shoot’n n Fish’n) was credited with being the first man to fly faster than sound.

For many years supersonic flight was the realm of the military only but Concord changed all that.

Although Concord has now been retired as uneconomic it looks likely that either as a luxury for the very rich or a service for corporated princes Supersonic flight will soon return to civil aviation as more and more projects move to fruition. In the mean time we will have to leave it to the military to provide us with sights such as this F 22 with its striking cloud trail.
The phenomenon is called a vapor cone or a shock collar, and, if you want to get really technical, a Prandtl–Glauert singularity. It is beautiful demonstration of how quickly things happen at the molecular level

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/supersonic-speed-demons-breaking-sound-barrier/story?id=8716157