Blake Scholl

So how many pilots do I need?

Well, if the flight's twice as fast, I need half as many pilots.

If the flight's twice as fast, I need half as many airplanes.

Or to look at it more positively, I can get twice the flights out of the same airplanes and crew.

I didn't even think of that either.

So if you could fly to Hawaii today on a propeller plane, that is more efficient than today's jets.

But nobody does it because economically it would be more expensive because it takes all that extra time.

If we look at overture relative to Concorde and we imagine another step beyond overture of a similar size, we can do economy, supersonic.

That's going to require a lot of invention.

It's going to require a second-generation powertrain.

And boy, I get my juices flowing about that.

Because the most surprising thing about this airplane, and I think why it's just barely possible for a startup to pull this off, is it doesn't actually have any fundamentally new technology.

This is made out of the same stuff as a 787.

It's like we took a 787, we shrank it down, we made it long and skinny, we put twice as many engines.

That's it.

It's a lot of new engineering, but it's not any new science, and it's not any new technology.

It's proven stuff.

And we did it that way because we wanted to keep the hurdle for version one as low as it possibly could be.

For version two, we're willing to say, hey, let's try five new things.

And one of those is going to be a radically new powertrain that will allow us to go much faster while also being much quieter.