Blake Scholl: Breaking the Supersonic Ban
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Why did Blake Scholl decide to bring back supersonic passenger travel?
I want to start by saying, Houston, we have a problem. In 1969, we landed on the moon for the first time. And the same year we flew Concorde, the faster than the speed of sound airliner. The future was supposed to be faster and better. We were supposed to look forward to innovation in air and in space. And yet half a century later, we can't go to the moon and we can't fly fast in the speed of sound. And not only have we lost the ability to go fast, we've lost the ability to do things even at any kind of reasonable speed. This was the Wall Street Journal just a couple of weeks ago. It now takes Lockheed more than two years to build a new Patriot missile interceptor. This is crazy. This is no way to build the future.
And this is no way to win a war. If we look back at history, this is the Boeing 707. This is the airliner that brought us into the jet age. But if we fast forward half a century, this is the 787, their latest airliner, which by the way was launched more than 20 years ago. You can't spot the difference. It doesn't fly any faster. It doesn't make the world any more accessible. Prior to Boom, the closest America ever got to a supersonic airliner was a mock-up. But I guess it's all okay because flying's really great, right? But for me personally, there is nothing so moving as flying. Think about that experience of going down the runway, of gathering speed, rushing to hundreds of miles per hour, then climbing into the sky, having this thing that we call a bird's eye view, but it really is a human's eye view.
In near perfect safety, being able to look down at the beauty of the natural world, as well as the beauty of everything that humanity has created, we get to ride aboard the wings of Newton and the Wright brothers while taking in the creations of Edison and Rockefeller. Yet flying, which should be one of the most inspiring experiences we could ever do, we've turned into something that most people dread. But if we look back in history, it wasn't always this way. Those first jetliners truly did double the speed of what had come before them. And it was a double the speed of air travel. The most important changes were on the ground. Hawaii was simply not a tourist destination before the speed of the jet.
It was the ability to get from the US to Honolulu in seven, eight, nine hours that turned Hawaii into a mainstream tourist destination. Shoes. There's a connection even between air travel and the shoes we wear. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, started the company in the 1960s on a chance trip to Japan when he fell in love with Japanese-style running shoes. And Nike got their start importing Japanese running shoes to America. Or music. Long before Spotify or Napster, music started to become global. The Beatles took the first world tour in the late 1960s, a tour that simply would not have been practical 10 years earlier with slower airplanes. So I'd like to invite you to imagine with me, what would happen if we had another doubling of speed?
What would happen if we could cross the Atlantic in three and a half hours? What would happen if Sydney were as easy to get to as Honolulu is today? What would be the Beatles, the Nikes, and the Hawaii's of a supersonic age? In my mid-20s, I started to think about what it would take to bring back supersonic passenger travel. And I set a lifetime goal of breaking the sound barrier. So like any tech nerd in my 20s, what did I do? I put a Google News alert on supersonic. And yet, there was more progress in supersonic music than supersonic flying. So I started to wonder, how would it be that supersonic travel could come back? The obvious thing seemed to be that it would be a private jet, a business jet made by somebody like Gulfstream for the wealthiest people on the planet.
But one of the fallouts of the Concorde era was that we actually banned supersonic flight in the US. And since most Gulf Stream miles are overland in the US, there simply wasn't much of a business case without a regulatory change. And nobody in the business jet world wanted to try to change the regulations.
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