Blake Scholl

We broke the sound barrier three times, three times in mock cutoff, boomless condition.

Microphones in the ground confirmed it.

And then I'm on X and I'm just talking with people.

And the plan had been, you know, this is a trans-oceanic airplane.

It's not a CONUS airplane.

And the internet is convinced that we're all about solving sonic boom.

And I can't convince people that wasn't the point.

Um, and I remember thinking about, wait a minute, we did this thing in boomless cruise and this physics called mock cutoff that we can get into how that works.

Um,

And we looked at it for the Overture airliner and decided it wasn't practical because when we were building on these outsourced engines, it wasn't.

In order to do this boomless thing, you have to break the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude that the boom can make a U-turn in the sky and never touch the ground.

And the Rolls-Royce engines couldn't do it.

So we sort of put it aside as impractical.

But meanwhile, we started designing our own engines and optimizing them.

And every time I go to these engineering meetings, it's like, well, the transonic Excel altitude just went up 1,000 feet.

Went up another 1,000 feet, another 1,000 feet.

And I started thinking, well, what if the internet is right and I'm wrong?

And so we called an emergency Saturday engineering meeting.

And I said, team, we've got different engines than last time we did this analysis.

We need to rerun the analysis and overture.