Stanton Hogfeldt, age 9, of Rockford, Ill., for his question:

How can a supersonic jet use its radio?

Maybe you have wondered how long it takes a radio program to travel from the broadcasting station to your set. The answer is that radio signals go fast enough to travel around the equator seven times in less than a second. If the radio station is 50 miles away, they reach you in a tiny tiny part of a second  which is almost no time at all. If the signals came by ordinary sound, they would take l0 seconds to travel about 50 miles.

Radio is very different from ordinary sound. It travels l86,000 miles a second. Ordinal y sounds go about a mile in five seconds. They also need air through which to travel and radio signals do not. A supersonic jet travels faster than ordinary sound but no where near the speed of radio. It can use radio sounds, even if it flies above the air