Blake Scholl: Why Plane Speed Stalled, Supersonic Commercial Flight, & Revolutionizing the Engine
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Why is supersonic commercial flight still stalled and how is Boom tackling the sonic boom problem?
Set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders from major airlines. The founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic.
Boeing hasn't built a new airplane in 20 years. I mean, it's David and Goliath, but Goliath is like asleep. We're here to bring back supersonic passenger travel and ultimately to make the planet dramatically more accessible. This whole airplane was built by essentially 50 people. By 50 people. The moment you become an expert, what you're steeped in is the past, and then you're completely useless. Courage is not being fearless. Courage is acting despite the fear. If there's no boom, at all. There's nothing to argue about. The world needs supersonic flight. Passengers deserve it.
Please welcome Blake Shoal.
Good morning. Houston, we have a problem. In nineteen sixty-nine we landed on the moon and we flew an airliner through the sound barrier. Yet more than half a century later, we can't go to the moon and we can't fly faster than the speed of sound. The legacy, the political legacy of Concord was a ban on supersonic flight over the US. Boeing brought us into the jet age in nineteen fifty seven with the seven oh seven But fast forward to today, and their latest airliner is a literal carbon fiber copy of their first. By the way, we have interns born after the last time Boeing launched a new airplane in two thousand four. This is insane. But imagine an alternate timeline in which innovation in flight had continued.
What if we could cross the Atlantic in three and a half hours? What if Sydney were as accessible as Honolulu is today? What would that do for business, for culture? Even for love. Who could do something about this? Twelve years ago, I was a software engineer and an ads guy from Amazon and Groupon. The idea that somebody with nothing more than a pilot's license could do something about this seemed laughable. In twenty fifteen, I pitched my old big boss, Jeff Bezos, on Boom's Seed Round. And he passed. And then he wrote this in the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter. There are certain things that only large companies can do. No matter how good an entrepreneur you are, you're not gonna build an all-composite airliner in your garage startup.
Not one that you'd wanna fly on anyway. I took that a little personally. But I don't blame Jeff. This is what our garage looked like back then. And th this was actually a slide from our pitch deck. That's that is in fact a supersonic airliner mock-up made from cardboard plywood and seats from Office Depot. But big things often have humble beginnings. And fast forward to last year, and Boom became the first private company ever to build a supersonic jet.
Something that the big companies that have put thousands of people on we did with just fifty really dedicated men and women. And when we flew that airplane, we had the first supersonic installation of Starlink. So people around the world could tune in, watching uh video filmed on an iPhone streamed via Starlink. And my favorite part was the pictures that people started sending me from classrooms. Kids that would have tuned out on flight instead tuned in. Some of them stood up. And some of them even jumped up and down. Isn't that great? One of those is a future chief engineer, I guarantee it. I'd like to invite you now to relive that moment with me.
From that fateful moment the Kitty Hawk. We strove to fly higher and faster. pilot and this airplane are about to be the first ever to fly faster than the speed of sound. Concord showed us the future of passenger flight in nineteen sixty nine. In 2003, we lost all that. The sound barrier was back. But we are still pioneers, and humanity will always want to reach higher. The small team with a big dream. In twenty twenty-five, XB One became the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier. You
are Go for Excel to mock one point one.
But this time we demonstrated that supersonic flight could be boomless. And now the sound barrier can stay broken.
Thank you. Uh I thought that would get old, but it never does.
What is Boom’s “boomless cruise” technology and how does it eliminate the sonic boom?
Uh XB one uses actually a far simpler technique than others have talked about to solve sonic boom.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
Why is supersonic commercial flight still stalled and how is Boom tackling the sonic boom problem?
0:00–5:10
2
What is Boom’s “boomless cruise” technology and how does it eliminate the sonic boom?
5:10–9:11
3
How did Boom secure the legal breakthrough to re‑legalize supersonic flight in the United States?
9:11–9:53
4
Why did Boom pivot from building jets to developing a proprietary supersonic engine?
9:53–14:32
5
How is Boom using digital design and manufacturing to build its own turbine core?
14:32–17:14
6
What is the plan to repurpose the supersonic engine core for data‑center power generation?
17:14–17:33
7
What are the projected ticket prices and timeline for the first commercial supersonic routes?
17:33–17:34
Speakers
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