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

0:00Set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders from major airlines. The founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake Scholl. 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.

0:35The world needs supersonic flight. Passengers deserve it. Please welcome Blake Scholl.

0:52Good 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 U.S. 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.

1:44What 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.

2:28No matter how good an entrepreneur you are, you're not going to build an all-composite airliner in your garage startup. Not one that you'd want to fly on anyway.

2:40I took that a little personally.

2:44But I don't blame Jeff. This is what our garage looked like back then. 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 Boone became the first private company ever to build a supersonic jet.

3:15Something 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 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.

3:43Some 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 to Kitty Hawk, we strove to fly higher and faster. This pilot and this airplane are about to be the first ever to fly faster than the speed of sound. Concorde showed us the future of passenger flight in 1969. In 2003, we lost all that. Good morning. For the last time, Speedbird Concorde 2. The sound barrier was back. But we are still pioneers, and humanity will always want to reach higher.

4:33A small team with a big dream. In 2025, XB-1 became the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier. You are go for Excel's Mach 1.1. But this time, we demonstrated that supersonic flight could be boomless.

4:56And now the sound barrier can stay broken.

5:05Thank you. I thought that would get old, but it never does. XB1 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.

5:51But this was just an executive order, and theoretically some idiot could reverse it, right? So we went to Congress, and we said you should make that permanent. And the Supersonic Legalization Act passed the House. Anybody guess what the vote was? It's actually unanimous. It's unanimous. And it got out of Senate Congress unanimously recently, and now we have to get through the rest of the Senate. And I think we should just do it unanimously, right? Because that's bad ass. So, okay. So it's all full speed ahead, right? And, like, we get to look forward to superfitting passenger flights soon. But, wait, there was actually a problem.

6:27Not that long ago, people declared boom dead. One of the dumbest things I ever did was try to outsource our engine development to a big old company. And that plan didn't work out. And we broke up with Rolls-Royce very publicly, and people said we were doomed. So we decided to do the thing everyone said was really impossible, to make our own engine from scratch to pair perfectly with the airplane. Turns out that effort's actually working. And we had an opportunity not just to build our own jet engine, but to reinvent how engines are designed with the world's most advanced digital design tools, and then to change how they are actually manufactured, also with the power of digital manufacturing.

7:11So we're not just designing our own engines, we're not just making our own engines, we're making our own engine parts down to the turbine blades. I have one of those with me this morning. My girl was like, is that a turbine blade in your pocket? Or are you happy to see me?

7:29So our philosophy is that engineering and manufacturing have to work together. And if we want to re-industrialize America, we need to invent the next generation of manufacturing technology here and use that to build the most incredible new products, not just try to bring back what we lost to China. So as we speak, our first vertically integrated jet engine core is getting assembled, and it's going to be in a test stand next month. So things are starting to get pretty exciting. Now, in a bizarre twist of history, the thing that everyone said would kill us, that we didn't have a big company making an engine, actually turns out to be the thing that makes a supersonic startup financially viable.

8:16It turns out if we take our supersonic engine technology that's designed to run full duration at high power in a hot environment at Mach 1.7, and we take the fan off the front and And instead, we put a generator in the back. It does this. Right? So our first application of our engine isn't in the sky. It's actually on the ground for data centers. And we can wrap this up in a couple trailers. And we can deploy 42 megawatts for behind-the-meter power generation with a supersonic engine core that's designed to run hot so it doesn't need any water. And I think we all know the water thing is kind of a bullshit objection, but why not make it go away?

9:03So, as we speak, we are building, in an undisclosed location, the world's most advanced jet turbine factory. And our philosophy is the exact opposite of what you find at every legacy big company, with lots of outsourcing and a return on net assets philosophy that makes you spin out your crown jewels. So we are manufacturing our own engines at scale, starting from raw materials, then going to the parts, including the most difficult ones like blades and veins, and then assembling them, and then running on our own test ad. And the factory you're looking at here made its first parts last week, and it will scale to making multiple gigawatts per year.

9:43And over the next five years, we aim to add 10 plus gigawatts to the grid.

9:53What this means is, as future passengers, we get to look forward to flying faster than the speed of sound, twice as fast over water, 50 % faster over land with no sonic boom, and doing it on what will actually be the most tested new jet engine ever made, thanks to being proven on the ground first. So there's still many, many hard problems to solve. Success is not guaranteed. But I think there's a lot of reason to be excited for a faster future, more connected world, and American leadership in aviation.

10:32Nicely done, Blake. We're going to talk for a sec. Stay here. So a couple of questions for you. Really, when can we get on that plane? How much will it cost? Two very simple things. I'm looking for a date and a number. A date and a number, right. These are my favorite questions. I'm sure your board asks once in a while. You know, I mean, the thing about, you know, faster flight is everybody wants it so long as it's safe, comfortable, and affordable. And Concord is really like zero out of three. And we should do three out of three. So I'll give you the numbers. Round trip across the Atlantic at Mach 1.7, three and a half hours.

11:06And the break-even fare is about$3 ,500. Each way? Round trip. No. Round trip. That's the break even. And so, of course, it will probably go for more than that. But any dollar above that, United's making some good money. Okay, fantastic. And when our goal is four years, but I think I've learned along the way is it's more important to be fast than to be predictable. So how long will it actually take? I can't say with certainty. But we're moving as fast as we can, and we'll make sure that it's available at the earliest date that it's physically possible. So we're looking at potentially 2030, give or take, Blake versus, say, Elon timing.

11:46So when you're doing the impossible magical thing, it can take a little extra. You keep talking about over oceans. But my understanding, you were on This Week in Startups a couple times early on, was that you're making it, that the sonic boom is going to go away and become like a sonic thump or a sonic pow or something. it's going to be like a lot less. It's a Sonic nothing, actually. Like literally, so there are two different techniques that people use for boom mitigation. And the one we're using is called, we call it boomless cruise. The nerds call it Mach cutoff. The boom comes off the airplane.

12:24It's kind of a normal strength boom. And it makes a big U-turn in the sky and never touches the ground. And that works up to about Mach 1.3 or 50 % faster than how we can fly today. So you can't go full speed boomless. But you can still go fast enough that you can leave New York, say, at 9 a.m. and land in San Francisco around 9.30 a.m. So it's still going to be pretty great. And then over water, you can go full speed, but no one's there to hear a boom. I mean, this is the key. I think everybody wants to know the New York to Los Angeles, San Francisco time. How is the data center project going?

13:00Do you have customers for this product already? And how many? How much is coming in? And let's talk dollars here because running a build in the Concorde is quite expensive, as Mr. Bezos pointed out to you. But this seems like a money printing business. Is it printing money? It's an incredible money printing business. I mean, I've never seen demand like this for anything else in my life. How many orders? Give us 10 customers, 100? There are tens of gigawatts of demand in my inbox. We're going to run that first engine next month, and then we're going to auction it all off. Did you talk to Elon about it?

13:33Is he interested for the Colossus? You should ask Elon. Okay, that's a yes. Okay, good enough. Do you ever think that as a name of a company for an airline, boom might be tempting the fates? I got it. I have a punch-up for you. How about Zoom? You know, no one's ever asked me about this before. No, it's like boom and you're there. It's fun. And we called the company Boom because I thought the sonic boom was never going to be the blocker. And so Boom is the company. The airplane is Overture. We wanted an innovative brand for the company and something for the airplane itself that would have real gravitas.

14:13There are some individuals who might look at this and say, any chance at a private aviation option in the 2.0? Is that a good business for you to be in to compete with Gulfstream and Falcon? I hope the private jet guys will make a supersonic jet they should. If they don't, I guess we'll do it. Okay. But let's talk about the future. I mean, I'll tell a story. So my daughter, my youngest daughter, who's four and a half now, when she was 18 months old, we'd watch rocket videos. When she was two and a half, I took her to watch a model Estes rocket. And I'm just the person I am. So I got the smallest little rocket, and I put the big D motor in it.

14:57and so that thing goes and it ends up in a tree three fields over and uh i thought it's pretty cool but she was upset and it took me a moment to realize why she was upset which is she expected the rocket to come back to the pad because i had done nothing but watch rocket landing videos with her like literally her entire life um and uh and what i realized is for supersonic there's an analogous thing uh we will have won when we've sped up flights for every passenger from the president on a supersonic air force one to a supersonic private jet to supersonic commercial flights that are available to every class of passenger yeah and so when you have to convince kids that it used to take six hours to cross the country and they're like what are you talking about dad like who would even do that like new york's not worth it if it takes six hours to get there uh that's when we've won yeah so that will take many generations of airplanes but we're not Final question.

15:53The company's now getting close to 10 years. 12, in fact. 12, in fact. Yeah. Okay. So very close. You passed it. You've had to work with multiple administrations. It's not a political show most of the time. I mean, when Trump's ratings are high, it's a political show. If they go low, talk a little less about it. But But thank you. Talk about how this administration has this administration compared to the last one in terms of embracing what you're doing. Because this is pretty exciting that you've been able to make such quick inroads in terms of regulations. And that is a big issue for your company specifically.

16:35Well, I think, I mean, first off, I think it's really cool that supersonic flight is not a partisan issue. and they were able to get stuff through Congress unanimously. That said, I love how fast this administration moves. Like it was, we broke, literally we broke the sound barrier on Monday. I tweeted about it. Elon reposted my tweet. I flew to D.C. that night to start the legalization campaign. By the time I landed, I had an invitation to the West Wing. So that's Tuesday. By Thursday, our airplane model has made it to the Oval Office. And by the way, it's still there. It's like one of the greatest product placements of all time.

17:12Like there's a supersonic JEP model in the Oval Office. Like I kind of love it. And then it took 115 days to get the executive order signed. To me, that felt slow. But it probably would have taken longer in a different administration. Yeah, I think Biden's going to call you back in about two or three weeks from when you called him eight years ago. Yeah. Sounds fast. It's a Biden joke. All right, let's give it up for Blake one more time. All right. Great job.