Blake Scholl: Why Plane Speed Stalled, Supersonic Commercial Flight, & Revolutionizing the Engine

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders from major airlines.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

The founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, Blake Scholl.

Blake Scholl (0:08)

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.

SPEAKER_1 (0:20)

This whole airplane was built by essentially 50 people.

Blake Scholl (0:24)

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.

SPEAKER_4 (0:40)

Please welcome Blake Scholl.

Blake Scholl (0:52)

Good morning. Houston, we have a problem. In 1969, 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 Concorde was a ban on supersonic flight over the US. Boeing brought us into the jet age in 1957 with the 707 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 2004 This is insane. But imagine an alternate timeline in which innovation and 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? 12 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 2015, 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 going to build an all-composite airliner in your garage start-up. Not one that you'd want to 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 this was actually a slide from our pitch deck 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 50 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 a 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.

SPEAKER_4 (3:56)

From that fateful moment, the Kitty Hawk, we strove to fly higher and faster.

SPEAKER_2 (4:02)

This pilot and this airplane are about to be the first ever to fly faster than the speed of sound.

SPEAKER_4 (4:10)

Concorde showed us the future of passenger flight in 1969 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 2025, XB1 became the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier.

But this time, we demonstrated that supersonic flight could be boomless.

And now, the sound barrier can stay broken.

Blake Scholl (5:05)

Thank you. I thought that would get old, but it never does. XB-1 uses actually a far simpler technique than others have talked about to solve sonic boom. We call it boomless cruise, and it uses the natural refractive power of the atmosphere to redirect the sonic boom upwards. So it's like if a tree falls in a forest, but no one was there to hear it, did it really make a sound? And we talked to the president shortly after breaking the sound barrier, and he agreed if there's no sonic boom, there should be no ban on supersonic flight. So that ban that started in 1973 actually ended June 6th of last year.