By Bethany Overland

The Associated Press has reported that a Normandy Park resident, Laura Joseph, was a passenger in the private plane that caused a major presidential airspace scare Tuesday at Boeing field. Quick military reaction to the assumed threat resulted in two F-15 fighter jets responding so quickly that their sonic booms shook King County and beyond.

The reason for the F-15s' mad dash from Portland to Seattle? Air Force One, the plane that was transporting a visiting President Obama, was parked at Boeing Field. The airspace had been reserved as "presidential"-meaning no other plane may pass through the area.

After landing safely in Kenmore, Joseph told The Associated Press that neither she nor the pilot knew the president was in town or that there were any restrictions on the air space surrounding Air Force One. The Highline Times could not reach Joseph for comment.

The two sonic booms were both heard and felt across the area around 1:50 p.m., the result of the two National Guard fighter jets that literally flew into action from their base in Portland. The jets were dispatched after the plane Joseph was reportedly traveling in entered a restricted air zone near Boeing Field.

"It shook our whole work building," said Burien resident Jake Jovanovich, who works at Gene Summy Lumber on West Marginal Way. "We work by a shipping yard so I thought someone next door had dropped a huge shipping container. Either that or a semi truck had crashed in front of our yard."

A sonic boom is an extremely loud, thunderous noise caused by an object moving so quickly through the air that it causes shockwaves to build up.

According to NASA, these shockwaves are created by the aircraft's speed pushing air molecules tightly together. When the "wakes" of these shockwaves (condensed molecules) meet, the noise can be heard for miles.

To create a sonic boom, the aircraft must be traveling at or over the speed of sound, which when combined with altitude, could be about 660 knots, NASA says.

In the business, a "knot" is the rate of travel used for both boats and aircrafts. The speed of sound is 661.7 knots, which works out to be about 760 miles per hour at sea level. The speed of sound decreases as the altitude increases, so planes traveling above sea level do not need to reach quite those speeds to break the sound barrier.

The first sonic boom was heard more than 60 years ago, according to NASA, when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier during a historic 1947 flight across California's Mojave Desert.

Bethany Overland is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.