>The very nature of an aeroplane will create ‘pressure effects’ around it – an aerofoil stays in the air because of the high pressure region beneath the wing attempting to migrate towards the low pressure region above the wing - well, that and all the little Bernoullis that hold it up!<
I'm familiar with Bernouilli's Theorem and the Kutta condition and so on; perhaps I didn't frame the question well enough. What Rawnsley & Wright called the 'pressure wave' is presumably downwash aided and abetted by circulatory flow. The question was really whether someone underneath would really experience that as the kind of sharp transient implied in the text or whether (as one might have intuitively thought) it would be a more diffuse pressure increase.
>The swirl of wing-tip vortices can often be heard after even a moderately a low pass or from an aircraft on approach to land.<
Interesting; I've never experienced that.