A very muffled sound, brief and sudden, was heard throughout the Paris region shortly before noon on Wednesday.
An "explosion noise" which quickly caused panic on social networks.
It was a Rafale plane crossing the sound barrier to intercept an unresponsive airliner.
The aircraft was cleared to go into supersonic mode at 11:52 a.m., while it was at an altitude of 10,000 m, and crossed the sound barrier at 11:56 a.m., not far from Créteil, which caused a noise comparable to that of a detonation.
François Coulouvrat, director of research at the CNRS and specialist in the supersonic boom, explains the phenomenon to us.
