Blake Scholl

As it turns out, there are about 600 routes that

around the planet that are primarily trans-oceanic, you know, not just New York, London, but Miami to Madrid and Seattle to Tokyo and LA to Sydney, where most of the flying's over water where there is no speed limit.

Okay.

Right?

And so our basic idea was, well, Concorde missed on cost and it missed on comfort.

So we've got to solve those problems.

We've got to make the seats nicer and we've got to get the cost down to the point that more people can afford to fly it.

And today...

I mean, there's really nice flatbed seats at the front of the airplane in business or first class for international flights, right?

And people pay top dollar, 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20 grand to be up there.

And the whole premise is, I hate the flight as long.

Give me a flying bed so I can sleep through it.

But of course, if you make the flight twice as fast, you don't need the bed anymore.

The experience could be more like flying first class domestically.

And so the basic idea was, can we improve upon the efficiency of Concorde enough that people would be able to trade a flying bed for a supersonic seat instead and sleep at home, not on the airplane?

And to do that, you need a remarkably small improvement versus Concorde.

Like the math closes at less than 10% improvement versus 1960s technology.

Now, we found a lot more than 10%.

We put all the extra into making the seats nicer and the airplane more comfortable.

But that was the basic idea.