Blake Scholl
speaker
562 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 29 Jul
Blake Scholl’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thank you.
We were able to do many things for the first time on that airplane.
First, the first privately developed supersonic jet.
Previously, this had been the work of governments and militaries with enormous budgets.
It was also the first supersonic jet made in America.
The first human piloted airplane landed solely on augmented reality with no natural view of the runway.
And the first supersonic air-to-air live stream filmed on an iPhone, streamed via Starlink,
And of course, most importantly, legalizing supersonic flight in the US.
We did all of this with a remarkably small team.
The XB1 team was just 50 incredibly committed, passionate men and women who were willing to keep going when other reasonable people would have given up.
So how is it that something that used to take billions of dollars and thousands of people was suddenly done by a small team with a comparatively small budget?
The key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development, to reduce the cost of iteration, both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms.
What does that look like?
If you're coming at this from a software perspective, I think we all know that great software is modular.
If you change something in this pit of code over here, it shouldn't change something in the behavior of this code over here, not if it's well-designed.
But great airplanes are incredibly integrated and everything affects everything else.
The best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, of aerodynamics, of structures, of all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it.
And if we do something like add another row of passenger seats, it makes the fuselage heavier, the engines have to get more powerful, the wings have to get redesigned, everything changes.
And so classically, these pace of iteration for complex integrated hardware has been very slow.
Imagine a whole bunch of engineering specialists, each working in an Excel spreadsheet on their own discipline, and then handing off the results of analysis from one engineer to another.
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