He would speak to any group interested in hearing him. I got him to come speak to my aerospace engineering department my senior year. I drove him from MCI to Lawrence, introduced him to professors and student groups, and then back to the airport after the talk.
I can't remember if it was there or some other event where he said that in normal simulator training after the accident instead of saying the number of his simulated flight, he actually said, "232, going around."
Your comment is ignorant of recent decades of research on how to form the aircraft to deaden the shockwaves caused by supersonic flight. F-4s certainly weren’t designed for that. The waves can be curved and spread out so that they are thumps as described, rather than sharp cracks.
The only on-site fatalities in that crash were two girls who were extremely unlucky in being covered by foam and then run over by a fire truck. There was also a heart attack victim who succumbed later at the hospital.
