The Return of Supersonic Air Travel | Blake Scholl, Founder of Boom Supersonic

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
It's been over 20 years since we last had Supersonic flight. In fact, the Concorde's first flight was in 1969, and today still the flight time between New York and London is the same as it was about 50 years ago. So the world around us has changed quite a lot. Blake, why not planes?

**Blake Scholl** (0:20)
I think it goes back to the story of how innovation works and how it doesn't work. The first 50 years of flight from the Wright brothers through to the introduction of jet travel in the late 1950s, every step forward, which by the way, every step forward was a step in speed, was driven commercially. Douglas built the DC-3 because he saw a large market opportunity for that specific airplane. Boeing brought the 707 to market, the first really successful jet lighter, again, because they thought they could sell a lot of them and that the product made sense. Then in the 1960s, we lost our way and we shifted from a commercially driven model of innovation in aerospace to a national prestige different model. So we did Concorde for Supersonic and we did Apollo for space exploration. And it's a little bit heresy to say this as an aerospace person, but I think both were terrible ideas and we shouldn't have done them. And I think Apollo killed space exploration and Concorde killed supersonic flight. Because what happened was, instead of having to have an entrepreneurially led, commercially led approach where the product has to make sense, that it has to be worth developing and the costs matter, we had sort of unlimited government resources poured into government spec projects. And so Apollo, obviously, there was no business model for going to the moon. Nobody even talked about it. But Concorde was in some ways worse because it pretended to be commercial.
And yet nobody thought hard about the economics. They were just trying to beat the Russians. So here's a hundred seat airplane, by the way, a hundred uncomfortable seats. You might mistake them for seats out of Southwest or Ryanair, where adjusted for inflation, the ferries ended up being about $20,000. And so if it's the 1970s or 80s, you can't find a hundred people that want to drop 20 grand to go somewhere really fast in an uncomfortable seat. It never made any sense. It was dead on arrival. And yet the consequences of this were just tremendous. On one hand, the industry learned all the wrong lessons from Concorde. And they concluded that supersonic flight was not viable. Not that Concorde was not viable. So there's two things got equated. And worse, because now this is a matter of national prestige, now geopolitics got involved, right? And so the American competitor to Concorde was canceled. And after that happened, then we did the stupidest thing that we've ever done in the history of regulation, which is we banned supersonic flight in the US. And that, I think, if you pull on that thread, it takes you all the way to like the collapse of Boeing that we're seeing now, because literally, it was not possible to build the next better product, because the next better product would have been a supersonic private jet. It was designed to carry a couple of wealthy people coast to coast. It would have been small, simple, and that would have started off the next innovation cycle.
And had that happened, we'd all be going Mach 5 by now. But basically, they banned the minimum viable supersonic jet, and the result was half a century of stasis and regression. And I think one of the things that happened is it led to a whole generation of talented people who didn't even go into aerospace. Like one of the things that's really hard in building Boom is actually, I think the single hardest thing is the team. And the reason is there's like a missing generation of talented leaders, and they all work at like Google and Facebook and Amazon, and they don't work, they don't even work in this industry. And by the way, I was one of those, I had to switch industries.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:57)
Why did they ban it? Why did they ban supersonic air travel?

**Blake Scholl** (4:00)
So, every bad regulation has a moral cover story, and then a real story that's secret. And the moral cover story was Sonic Booms are bad, and we have to protect the public from Sonic Booms. It's bullshit. That was the moral cover story. The real story was, it wasn't yet obvious that Concorde was DOA, and the American competitor had just been canceled.
So now we have to protect Boeing from the European Concorde.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:31)
It's funny, too, because the thing that most people were concerned about is the noise. I'm assuming the Sonic Boom. But in reality, they just banned the actual supersonic flight, which was not the core issue. They actually banned the wrong thing. And that's the thing that prevented the innovation, is that they actually went for the source issue. It was like, these planes are really loud. We don't want them breaking windows or hurting people on a day-to-day basis. But in reality, they just stopped the entire thing, even though that's not always the reality. You guys actually managed to solve that.