EP 140: Blake Scholl (Founder and CEO, Boom Supersonic) on Why Supersonic Flight Failed & How Boom is Bringing it Back

29:17Mach 1, the speed, which is how fast? It varies, but think 700-ish. 700-ish. And so how did that regulation come to be? Well, this was protecting Boeing from Concord. So this was 1973. Congress had said, hey, FAA, figure out a way to protect the public from sonic booms that can be bad. And then what actually happened is we got a speed limit. And sonic booms for people that don't, I mean, I assume most people know what a sonic boom is, but can you just explain what a sonic boom is? I think there's not much understanding of what a sonic boom is. Think of it as like the wake of a boat. And so when a boat goes by, if you're like right next to a big boat, you'll feel a big wake.

30:05If there's a smaller boat or a boat further off on the other side of the lake, the wake is smaller. But it is basically the pressure wave a supersonic airplane creates anytime it's supersonic. And today, because there are no commercial supersonic airplanes, there are only fighter jets. If you scramble a fighter jet and you fly supersonic at a low altitude, it makes a very loud sound. However, if you fly an airliner at 60 ,000 feet, it's a completely different story. And one of the breakthroughs that was not part of our original plan, but something we figured out along the way, is it could actually do it with no audible sonic boom.

30:44So, and we'll show a picture on screen of, there was actually captured of what it looks like and you can almost see the wake behind. And so I guess that's an important point though. I think when people think of the sonic boom, there's the auditory element associated with it. And so what is that? What is the, when people and when Boeing is lobbying against this, obviously people don't want huge loud noises flowing down and disrupting cityscapes or whatever, uh, countrysides. So I think what we're going to see actually happen is that this could happen very quickly because nobody's opposing it now.

31:24Um, and it just makes common sense. If there's a supersonic flight with no audible boom, it should be allowed full stop. If there's an audible boom, then reasonable people might differ about too loud or not. And, um, and that's a, that's a complex conversation, Which goes to your point on the auditory regulation should have been where we would have landed if we were trying to do a societal good around this back in 1973. If Boeing was, it's like, okay, let's focus on the noise element of it. And instead, we focused on the speed element of it, which is theoretically an input into the noise element, but not necessarily.

32:02Not directly, right? Right. The thing that should obviously be allowed is boomless supersonic flight. And by the way, this is a concept that's been around kind of theoretically in academia for a long time, but now we've done it. And so that's something that I'll show you the picture and we'll put it up on screen. So we broke the sound barrier on our prototype airplane earlier this year. um it's called the xb-1 um it is the first supersonic jet uh made not by a nation state it's the first one made out of airliner ready technology it's the first civil supersonic jet since 1969 it's the first one ever made in america um for people basically uh for people listening we'll show it on or watching we'll show it on screen for people listening it basically looks like a boat with a wake behind it almost, which is, are those the sound waves?

32:58They're called shock waves. So basically, I'll be nerdy for a second here. The best question that nobody asks is, what does the speed of sound have to do with an airplane? And the answer is, the speed of sound is the speed at which pressure waves move in air. And airplanes are all about pressure waves. If you're flying less than the speed of sound, there is a pressure wave in front of the airplane that's basically nudging air out of the way before the airplane gets there. If you're flying supersonic, that means the airplane's outrunning the pressure wave, which means when it smacks into the air, it compresses it.

33:37And so you get these little bands of compressed air that come off the airplane. And the way they stack up on top of each other as they go from the airplane down to the ground, it can create this sort of constructive interference. It creates this sort of like N-shaped wave that is heard on the ground as a sonic boom. So you've been at this for 11 years? Very nearly, yeah. Nearly 11 years. And you recently had your first flight that broke the sound barrier? That's right, yeah. And so what is the business forward from here? So we're looking at, we got in front of us this United plane. Like, I guess, where do things sit from a timeline commercial applicability?

34:20Yeah, I mean, so I think where we are now is we've really had supersonic aviation's Falcon 1 moment. And the Falcon 1 was the, that was the first SpaceX rocket that made it to orbit. And so what we did on XB-1, I think in some ways was even more meaningful because there was a human on board. The first three Falcon ones blew up and it was okay because they were unmanned. But we have a pilot on board our airplane. Of course, we're going to have passengers on board the product airplane. So failure is not an option. So we demonstrated it can be done by a small team with a relatively small amount of capital and that the technology actually exists.

35:01And moreover, we can do it without an audible sonic boom. And so what's next? It's time to go big. This is a business that was, to this point, funded by VCs investing their own money to kind of get to the right point of demonstration that the technology is there and the team can really do it. And now it's time to scale up and go big and build the airplane that you and I get to fly on. And we will start building the first full-scale airplane next year. and our goal is to have it in the air by the end of 28 and ready for passengers by the end of 29. So we are, if we look at technically where the development is, we are a few months ago where the Boeing 777 was five years before it carried passengers.

35:54So if we execute as well as 1990s Boeing, it's less than five years for you and I can buy a ticket and break the sound barrier. And what is the relationship with United? United was first to place an order with a deposit. And I think I have an enormous amount of gratitude for the leadership team at United that had the vision to place an order for supersonic jets during COVID. And it was really Scott Kirby and Mike Leskinen who looked at COVID and said, everyone else is retrenching. This is actually the time to build for the future. And so they made a couple of bold bets. They made a bet on supersonic flight, and they made a bet on eVTOL.

36:44And they were willing to put their money behind the bet and put their brand behind the bet. And so United ordered 15 overtures. They pre-ordered another 35. And most important, they're actually working with us on the airplane development. So the United team is deeply involved in our development. When we do technical reviews, United comes to them. Their pilots fly the simulator. They give us feedback. Their flight attendants look at how the galleys work, help us make sure that those are going to be great. So an airplane has a million decisions that go into it in creating the product. And if I contrast Boom with, say, a SaaS company, there's this sort of falsehood that SaaS companies are less capital intensive than deep tech.

37:36But if you look at the money consumed by an Uber or a Lyft or an Airbnb versus the capital consumed by a SpaceX or an Andro, it turns out the SaaS companies actually consume more VC. But there is an important difference, which is how much capital do you need to demonstrate product market fit with a shipping product? To get to the zero to one, that's something. Yeah. So you can build an Uber and see if anybody wants to use it for a small amount of money. And if it doesn't work, well, people lose their seed money, but that happens all the time and it's okay. You can't test product market fit on a supersonic airplane by shipping it.

38:15You have to test it differently. And so one of our very early insights was we basically needed a Kickstarter for supersonic aviation. And so getting orders with real non-refundable deposits and getting the airlines to lock hands with us and be part of the development program such that we're not going to ship another Concorde that they don't want, that their passengers can't afford. We call it the three-legged stool. There's the technical execution of the airplane, which in many ways is the easiest part. People have been building supersonic jets for a long time. We just have to build it capitally efficiently.

38:51But then there's the, what are airlines really going to be able to operate profitably and what are passengers going to pay for? And getting those three things in sync is really important? You know, should it be a little bit more seats, a little bit less seats? Do you want a little bit more range, a little bit less range? All of those decisions really matter. And we needed to prove to ourselves that what we were building has product market fit before we're done physically building it. It's impressive. I mean, you've pre-sold more planes than Concorde ever sold. We have the first five years of production in the books.

39:27And so how much capital have you consumed to date, raised, consumed? Yeah, we've consumed about 450. 450. Which makes it, by a large margin, the most efficient supersonic development program in history. We did XB1 with 50 people, including the engineers that designed it, the technicians that put it together, the test pilots, all of that. And we've also designed a full-scale jet engine. We've designed a full-scale airplane. We have a factory, almost 200 ,000 square foot factory in North Carolina. Like we've done a lot for about 450. And so what stands in between now and me being able to go on a plane?

40:11It's scaling up the engineering. So just a few weeks ago, we hit what's called config freeze, meaning we broke the engineer's pencils and said, you're done optimizing. It's time to go build. so the um there is a slightly refined version of this airplane i think to the layman you wouldn't notice the difference but it actually takes a bunch of lessons we learned from the xb-1 test plane folds it into overture and uh and so we are we're now doing the more detailed engineering uh next year we'll start building parts um around the end of this year we'll have the first full scale engine running on a test stand and uh and then we will take it through an enormous amount of testing.

40:51We'll do as much as we can on the ground. What we have to do in the air, we'll do in the air. And then we will, all along the way, we're working with the FAA and generating their buy-in so that when we're all done, everyone agrees it's ready for passengers. And plus or minus, what is the shelf life of an airplane? What do they typically sell for? Can you just give this sense of economics? Yeah, so a typical Boeing 200-seat wide-body airplane, like a 787, after all the discounts, it's on the order of$150 million. And the time to pay back on that for an airline is about a decade. And we sell - And they last for how long?

41:38Decades. Decades. I mean, by the way, which is a demonstration of the lack of innovation. like they should be obsolete long before they wear out but they're not um uh the product cycles have gotten the innovation is so poor that the products have a very long shelf life long longer than they really should have it's pretty remarkable like to think about decades plus uh products that we use in other i mean televisions 10 years ago just uh 20 years ago just look ridiculous compared to today, you would never use it even though they're functional enough to work. In the 1960s, the average time an airliner would stay in service was about six years, not because they fell apart, but because there was a new one that was better that you wanted to upgrade to.

42:24So I think one of our biggest goals at Boom is to speed up the innovation cycles and to shorten the development costs and timeline for new airplanes so we can iterate much faster, ship newer products much faster. But Overture is like the first of what's going to be a whole family of products. We're going to build a smaller one that's a private jet. We'll build a larger one that can have a coach cabin in it. There will be a whole family of airplanes, just the same way Boeing and Airbus have a whole family of airplanes. And Overture is just the starting point. So if we look forward in our lifetime, let's say 25, 30 years, what do you hope the future of travel looks like?

43:01There's going to be a lot more travel. So trivia question. When Uber launched in San Francisco and started out with black cars, what percentage of the black car market did they take? Within what period of time? A year or so. I don't know the answer to it. I would guess that, I mean, over time, it's much greater than 100%. You were the first person I've asked that question if we got that right. Thank you. I appreciate that. I usually hear things somewhere between 10 % and 70%, and the actual answer is 300%. Yeah. And so people talk in AI about Jevin's Law now, about when you reduce the cost of something, demand goes way up.

43:42But really, there's a broader principle, which is when you reduce the friction of something, demand goes way up. And cost is an element. Accessibility is an element. And I think what we're going to see with air travel is the market for supersonic jets is much, much larger than the market for subsonic jets. Because when flights are faster, people travel more. And we can look back in history because this is, by the way, this happened before. It happened in the 1960s when we went from propeller airplanes to jets, flights got twice as quick and travel went up sixfold. Nobody went to Hawaii before there were jets.

44:20Took too long to get there. And now it's like, okay, what about Sydney? Oh, who wants to go to Sydney? Takes so darn long. What if you go to Sydney as quickly as you could go to Honolulu? what if you could go to london have a dinner meeting and come home and tuck your kids in the same night what if our kids could grow up in a world where they actually have friends in other continents that they've spent time with what would happen if there's a factory in asia uh that produces a product and in less than 24 hours it could be back on the desk of the engineer that designed it right right now that takes 48 hours we'd actually double the rate of iteration the second order effects of supersonic flight will absolutely destroy the first order effects and so i think you know to go back to your question that the future is supersonic flight's not special it's just normal it's how we all fly and we do a lot more flying and the speed up that kicked off in the air ricocheted on the ground we figured out how to build much more efficient airports.

45:29Imagine you could arrive at the terminal 20 minutes before your flight without worrying you're going to miss it.

45:39All of that will put more liquidity in the travel ecosystem, more demand, more flights, more passengers. That means more frequency of flights, which means more choice of when you leave and when you arrive. And that flywheel starts spinning. It's the flywheel that started spinning in the 1960s with jets. And then it just kind of slowly coasted down because we haven't gotten any better. And it's the flywheel that Concorde never started because it wildly missed on product. In some ways, regulation at this point is a moat or an advantage for you all in that you had to go through all these different hoops to kind of get to where you are.

46:17Do you agree with? You might not morally agree with it. Not really. I mean, so we designed everything we're doing to make it easy for our regulators. And a thing I always tell the team is regulators are humans too. They want to work on things that are exciting. They want to be involved. They want to put their fingerprints on the things they work on. And they want to feel trusted and able to trust. So with XP1, what we did was we involved FAA from when it was on paper to when it was a bucket of parts, to when it rolled out, to when it was ready to fly. And we said, FAA, we're ready to, you know, we always said, come anytime you want, look at anything you want to see, talk to anybody.

46:58There are no secrets here. And when we said, we're ready, they gave us the paperwork the day that we asked for it. why it wasn't some miracle was common sense build build trust build buy-in as we go and then it's not a big deal and by the way this is a high profile program if we screwed it up it would make the regulators look really bad um so it's all the more important that we build trust as we go but it's this isn't rocket science this is just human relationships and doing good work and being transparent about the work. And when there's a problem, be open about it. When there's a tough decision, involve the regulators in the decision.

47:39If you could wave a magic wand for regulations that exist, or maybe elements of FAA and different considerations to make it easier to do what you've been able to do, is there one thing that stands out? Yes. Repeal the ban on supersonic flight. And where does that currently stand? I know Elon Musk said it's something that should happen under this administration. Yeah. I mean, I've been at the White House four times this year. I've been all over Capitol Hill. I've met with multiple cabinet secretaries. It's going to happen. That's great. What's been the hardest part of getting to where you are today?

48:18It's not the engineering. It's not even the financing. it is building a startup team in an industry that has not had a startup in a century. And so we have to find people who are incredibly good technically, but also have the right, I'll just call it startup gearing ratio, to move fast, to be efficient. And this is part of why I said earlier that I thought Concord destroyed supersonic and Apollo destroyed space exploration. And part of the insidious way they did that was by creating an entire industry that had no cost pressure. There are all these cost plus government contracts. And so if you're operating on a time and materials contract, you're incentivized to use more time and to use more materials.

49:08And you don't want to embarrass the customer, so you don't want to take risk and fail. and so all of that has led to a bunch of just calcification I'm sure we all see the same headlines about Boeing and their struggles but the whole industry has elements of that so we had to learn how to build a team where the incumbents were culturally the antithesis of what we needed to be where have you found these people from that comprise the core I don't know. Are these people that are similar to you in background that maybe came up in traditional tech world and then pursued this as an interest area? Or are they more Boeing entrepreneurial people?

49:53I'm not aware of any Boeing entrepreneurial people. There you go. That's easy. Take that one off the table. So we have some people from SpaceX. We care about what you can do, not what's on your resume. We care if you've solved a hard problem and you're passionate and smart and curious and learn quickly and driven by the mission. So for example, the guy that cracked the code on some really difficult landing gear engineering issues previously worked on janitorial equipment at a different company. I remember when I interviewed him, I looked at his resume and I'm like, why is the team having me talk to this guy?

50:33And then I had the conversation. I was like, oh, I get it. This guy is way bigger than a power mop. is a brilliant mechanical designer. And so we've tried to find really talented people from just anywhere. And we also find people who went to Boeing by accident earlier in their careers before they got corrupted. We hired another guy who ended up being a very talented mechanical designer who reached out to me and said, well, I went to Boeing because I wanted to work on a supersonic airplane. And somehow I didn't realize that would never happen. Can I please come to boom, this is what I really want to do.

51:10And there are a handful of stories like that as well. But we also just, we take young people and we put them in absurdly big roles and they can do it. Resumes or companies in general are something of a filtering mechanism when we talk about how good it actually is. Colleges, same thing, right? We can certainly rail on that probably for a while. But I'm curious, how as a sorting mechanism of talent, I assume you guys get a fair number of people coming through the doors applying? Everyone I know probably aspires to find the undiscovered talent, the undiscovered gems that could be at their company and really scale.

51:50It's hard to go pursue just people from SpaceX or Stripe or whatever it is, one of those businesses exclusively. And so I guess as a filtering mechanism, do you guys take a disproportionate number of first calls when people come through the door? Or how do you actually make this a practice that you can go through and try to find the undiscovered gems? There's sort of multiple. There's no single answer to this. One part is we keep our eyes open for high agency candidates. So people email me directly. And some of the best people we've ever hired have been cold emails to me. And so I place a lot of value on a well-written cold outreach.

52:33So that's kind of one avenue on it. Another is, and Brian Chesky talks about this a lot, starting with the work in reverse engineering the human. Like if there's a thing that we admire that is out there in the world, let's figure out who really did it and talk to them. Another twist on this is the way I got the initial team, so I wasn't from the industry. Like my last job, it's become a joke now. My last job I was a product manager at Groupon. And I remember going to LinkedIn and filtering for industry equals aerospace, connection equals first degree. No results. I didn't know a soul in the industry, not a soul.

53:15So, okay, second degree. Well, there was somebody who now worked at SpaceX who had played hockey in college with one of my directs at Groupon. Okay, great. Maybe I can get that meeting. Is that a strong enough connection to get a good intro? I'll try. And I flew down to Hawthorne in LA where SpaceX headquarters is. My only cred was I showed up in an airplane that I had flown myself, a little single engine. This was my only cred on day one. I had my pilot's license. And I sat with him and I explained what I was doing and why I thought it made sense. And he got pretty excited. and I said, Jamie, if you could wave a magic wand and get anybody in the world to come be in the trenches with me on this, and you're not thinking about whether they'd want to, you're not thinking about whether I can afford them, you're not thinking about whether they have a job that they're happy about now, all you're thinking about is who would you absolutely want in the trench with you fighting this battle, making this thing?

54:17Who would be your top five? and uh he said you think about it and on the flight back to uh palo alto my phone buzzed and i had five names um and so i met those five people and i asked them the same question and i was sort of recursively searching my network for the best people and you know there's that old joke about you know everybody's six degrees to kevin bacon uh turns out everybody's also six degrees to the very best people in aviation and so uh when i would tell people i was building a supersonic passenger jet, the first question was always, are you crazy? And people would rarely ask it out loud, but I could always tell it was the first question.

54:59And there was this meme amongst aviation people that there are always these internet guys with crackpot airplane ideas. And I remember when I met the guy who became our first chief engineer, I showed him the work I'd done on market sizing and on technical feasibility. And he looked at it. He says, wow, I didn't think you'd be this far. And I'm used to hearing a lot of airplane ideas that make no sense. This one actually makes sense. And then he wanted me to hire him as a consultant. And I was like, nope, you're either in or you're out, dude. And he couldn't stop himself. He just started building his own spreadsheets and his own models.

55:41He just could not help himself from working on this. And he became our first chief engineer. Along the way, I'm sure you've made a bunch of different trade-offs. Is there one that you feel was really a fork in the road that you're particularly happy you made? Yeah. We were insanely ambitious in our choices for what to target with our first prototype airplane. That made the job far harder. What to target? How so? So we said we're going to go fly. The original design was 10 % faster than Concorde, incorporated one passenger seat. It had all these requirements on it that on paper were very achievable.

56:24But we did not appreciate where the real breakpoints were in challenge, including we decided to put a person on it. like if we'd made a supersonic drone and the only goal was to like build a thing that looks like an airplane that breaks the sound barrier oh boy it would have been so much easier also we would have learned way less and proven way less we the most important thing we learned from xb1 two things one was how to build a safety culture hugely important um easier to say than it is to actually do. And number two, we learned where the real breakpoints in practicality were. And so when we said, okay, great, now we're ready to scale up to the airliner, we were able to make far more pragmatic choices.

57:08We backed off a little bit on speed. We went from Mach 2.2 to Mach 1.7. Why? Well, at 1.7, we can use completely off-the-shelf materials that were already certified for the 787. We don't need to qualify even the same materials for different operating environments. It's far easier to meet the same noise regulations that apply to subsonic jets for takeoff and landing at 1.7 than it is at 2.2. At 1.7, the aspect ratio on the wing can be wider, meaning a higher wingspan. That makes stability and control for takeoff and landing dramatically easier. One of the technical challenges on XB1 was at a Mach 2.2, you have this very slender airplane, slender wing, long, skinny fuselage.

57:55It's hard to make stuff fit. And at 1.7, which by the way, means another 15 minutes across the Atlantic, it's not that big of a deal. All of those things get easier. And along the way, taking all that thinking, remembering this is not a one-trick pony. We're going to ship an airplane and a 0.1 revision and a 0.2 revision, and then a 2.0 and a 3.0. We don't have to put every good idea on 1.0, that we can really embrace the M and MVP, minimum viable product. And that plus the experience in XB1 allowed us to be far more pragmatic about what we're doing. What's been the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned along the way?

58:42the most surprising thing that I never would have predicted was that an airline would place an order and give us money before we ever flew an airplane. I would have guaranteed on day one that that would never happen, but yet it did. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Mike. Do you think this happens ex-COVID that they're thinking about and taking into all the consideration? Or do you think that was a unique confluence of events? I think we've always found... So when we were going through YC, we did a pre-order deal with Virgin that we unveiled on demo day, like$2 billion LOI from Virgin. We got a pre-order from Japan Airlines actually before United.

59:23United was the first to put money in with an order. So why Virgin? Why Japan Airlines? Why United? Why American after that? There is a specific answer why that team, with that set of humans at that point in time, wanted to do the thing that did with us. And the answer is different for Richard Branson than it was for United, different from what it was for Japan Airlines. But at each point, we caught them in the right moment where this created real value for them short term and long term. Like when I met Richard Branson, there's a whole story of how I managed to basically crash a Virgin event to get time with him.

1:00:02But I explained to Richard what we were doing. We had a little model of the airplane with a Virgin logo on it. And he sat back in his chair. He says, wow, guys, this is brilliant. I love it. But I'm doing this Virgin Galactic thing. I don't think I've got an enemy to do two of these. And I said, Richard, no, no, no. I'm not asking you for your money. I'm not even asking for your belief that we're going to pull this off. All I'm asking is, when it works, would you like the first one to be for Virgin? And if you're willing to say, yes, I want this, I'll go get all the money somewhere else. I don't need your money.

1:00:41I just need your belief in the product, that it makes sense given everything you know about airlines. And he said yes to that. and um there was a similar story with japan airlines in a different way and that that deal took a year and a half versus the Virgin deal took eight weeks. But there's always a reason to why. And you got to find the company and the team in the right place. Like United wanted to build their story and their plan for how to make United the greatest airline ever. And I think that's actually one of the many things that's brilliant about Scott's leadership is he doesn't tell the team at United, be the best airline.

1:01:25That's actually not that inspiring today. He says, be the best airline in history. And that framing causes the team to rise to the occasion. And it causes them to think much more ambitiously about everything they do. Well, the best airline in history would have a faster airplane. The Symphony system that you guys have built out, can you describe to people what that was? And then I'm curious, was that an entirely new design or was it based on something existing? So Symphony is our full-scale custom jet engine. and this is there is still if you said what's the stink on boom I think we still have the biggest stink around engine because there is this mythology I think perpetuated by the big three engine companies that only the big three engine companies can build jet engines and I think we made the mistake along the way of flirting with them we publicly sort of dated with Rolls-Royce and so the world kind of thought that it was going to be a Rolls engine and I think when I made the mistake of feeding into that narrative, what we found along the way was a startup working with a hundred year old company was a really bad idea.

1:02:36They didn't want to build us a custom engine. They were only kind of shoehorn what they already had. And so we got to a point where we said, you know what, we're going to do this the SpaceX way. We're going to take control of our own destiny. And, you know, we will, we will happily create for you a face saving way off the program. Maybe we'll license something from you, you know, but we'll, you know, And then we'll lock arms and kind of wave goodbye and give each other a hug. And then what actually happened was – so United placed an order. About a year later, American placed a bigger order. And we were still incubating our own engine effort.

1:03:10We weren't ready to show it to the world yet. And Rolls freaked out. And they ran to the press and said, there is no supersonic market. We're not interested. uh i think i think because they didn't want to you know the market was clearly coming together and they weren't going to be part of it um and so that and that was just it was one of the darkest moments in boom history because the world was like ha ha boom has no engine they're building a supersonic glider um and uh uh and so we very you know my team wanted to just uh say everything we actually thought. Instead, we said, we're grateful to Rolls for our work, and we'll show you our engine when we're good and ready.

1:03:51And then eventually, we did announce our own engine program, and it's just like the rest of the airplane. This is all proven technology. There's nothing new on it, materials-wise or science-wise. It's just custom. And because it's fully custom, it is much, much better. So the whole boomless cruise thing would not be possible if we weren't doing our own engine. Because the key thing is it's got to be able to break the sound barrier at a sufficiently high altitude. That comes down to something called transonic performance. With a modified rolls engine, we can only break the sound barrier at 26 ,000 feet.

1:04:27Boomless doesn't work. With our own engine, we can do it well above 30. And it's a complete game changer because it can do supersonic over land with no boom. And that would not have happened if we hadn't said, all right, yes, we're going to follow in SpaceX footsteps. We're going to build not just our own vehicle, but our own engine too. People still think we're crazy for this, but like the actual craziness was entertaining any other plan. What is the, I guess, what was the timeline of how that went when that played out? Like the initial conversation with roles through the breakup? Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, on day zero, our plan was to build our own engine.

1:05:06And then I, you know, I'm accountable for this. I made the mistake of thinking, ooh, if there's a modifiable engine, wouldn't that be easier? And, you know, wouldn't it be nice to have the brand association? Because, you know, we're trying to convince the world that, like, we have any shot of pulling this off, right? And so we're executing like crazy, but anything that adds credibility, we're like, you know, I made the mistake of getting too thirsty for it. And so we kind of, you know, continued to go down paths with roles. but like you know kind of it was it looked great on the outside uh but a startup in a big british company is just not the gears don't mesh well and a supersonic airplane really wants a fully custom engine um and i think it was 2022 that kind of it all it all became public um and then you know where we are now uh we're building our first custom engine right now and it'll be running on a test stand around the end of the year.

1:06:04And so we will, you know, I'm sure it will be challenging, but the world will find out soon whether a startup can build a supersonic jet engine. What's the biggest difference between what you will have versus what currently exists in Marshall Airlines? It is a thing that is, I think, easy to miss coming from the software world is how important sizing is to physical engineering. What do I mean by sizing? Well, so Overture has a turbofan engine, meaning there's a jet engine core that powers a fan that blows air around the core of the engine. Okay. Well, which turbofan? What are the design parameters?

1:06:49What's the fan diameter? What's the actual size of the fan? How much air goes around the core versus through the core? What's the pressure ratio? What's the design operating temperature? And these are all choices. You can turn these knobs, you can make a bigger fan, a smaller fan, a bigger core, a smaller core. And a subsonic airplane tends to want a big fan and a small core. And a supersonic airplane tends to want a medium-sized fan and a big core. And it's the same stuff. It's just different, different sizing. Our fan blades are smaller than other people's fan blades. Our core is approximately the same size as the largest cores have been done.

1:07:27We're very careful not to go outside the bounds of what's been done before we don't want to stumble off and like oops we're building the world's largest single crystal um uh castings nope not on version one what's something that's uh maybe looks simple from the outside uh with the overture i guess in general uh that is actually insanely complex hmm uh low speed uh the the high speed's the easy part the low speed's the hard part. Everything for high speed, it drives you towards long, slender airplanes. It drives you towards skinny engines. And all of those things are the exact opposite of what you want for quiet, low speed takeoff and landing.

1:08:14So that the art is two airplanes in one. It can go fast and it can go slow. The fast part is easier than the slow part. And we spent a lot of energy on XB1, working out low speed stability and control. But all of those lessons, you just scale up very directly. And with our sort of backing off a little bit on top speed, it actually get a lot easier. On the business side of things, we talked a lot about the Concorde and some of the mistakes that they made. And it seems like you guys are taking a vastly different approach to it. So I guess as you've been talking to United and other folks that are interested in placing orders around this.

1:08:53Like how much of the business model or the price points and the considerations on all this, how much have you come to them with like, hey, here's how we think it should work. Here's a price point that we've sort of thought through. Here's the implications versus they came to you. And I guess where have those things met in the middle? Like what are we sort of talking about? Number of flights, price point. Yeah, so our approach was, we actually built a team out of ex-airline analysts. And we said, let's do all the work that we would expect an airline to do in evaluating the product before we ever call them.

1:09:30So - And when was this in the journey? Like how long ago? So I personally did this in 2014. Got it. And like a baby version. This is maybe what you showed up as SpaceX with? Some of the early - Yeah, yeah. I had a spreadsheet model of the airplane technically and a spreadsheet model of the airline economics and the overall market sizing. And that was something I built myself in Google Sheets with a bit of JavaScript code and some screen scraping of like market data out of FlightAware. And today we have pros doing the same thing. And it's far more sophisticated, but it gives basically the same answer.

1:10:02And so we would show up to an airline and we'd say, let's just show you the math here. Here's the vision. Let me show you the math. This is what the airplane can do. if you make this fare assumption this is how that sits relative to market fares this is how many people we think will fly on it these are the routes where I think it makes sense this is how you would schedule the airplane this is how many round trips you can do this is why you can fill those here are the departure times, the arrival times how it fits into your banking structure we kind of did all the work and because of that they're like oh it kind of makes sense and of course they'd have bits of feedback around the edges but I think if we'd said hey what airplane do you want we never would have gotten anywhere and so the price point for the consumers will net out about where about like business class today so your Concord$20 ,000 ticket uncomfortable seat Overture$5 ,000 ticket really nice seat the one thing it doesn't do for a transatlantic flight is lie fully flat when the flight's three and a half, four hours you don't need a flatbed just the same way you don't have a flat bed on a domestic flight that's three hours.

1:11:15So have you spoken publicly about the interior design and what that's going to look like? We have a little bit, but we have a couple of things that are still under the wraps. I'll share a bit. So Concord, if you've ever gone on one at a museum, the first impression is terrible. It's got a really short boarding door. Most people have to duck to get on. There's the equivalent of several rows of floor-to-ceiling equipment racks and a narrow aisle. so you just have to squeeze your human into this airplane and by the time you get to your seat you're already just emotionally convinced it's tiny and cramped and the seat's not great um so we said look uh we want to build something that passengers are going to want to fly over and over and over again and uh the first impression has to be great and the in-seat experience has to be great and uh and so we do have a long skinny airplane with a very unusual shape it's actually bigger in the front and skinnier in the back.

1:12:10The back of the airplane, the very last row of seats is the same diameter as like the best Gulfstream. And in the front, the boarding door is actually 10 inches taller than Concord's, an inch taller than a 737. And you step on board the widest part of the airplane where there are these like eight foot cathedral ceilings. So it's a great first impression. And then there is the front cabin has something I can't share yet. Uh, that if it was a collaboration between design and engineering that changed, it changed the, the aerodynamics of the airplane slightly, but created something that I think when people see for the first time, they'll be like, no way.

1:12:50Uh, from a consumer experience side. So, so as we look here, so is, is it two and two through here? How is it laid out? That'd be one way to do it. Okay. Got it. As you get near the back, as it narrows, I guess, let me ask this a different way. Uh, are there, are there different seating as you? Yeah. So the, the, the, the, the back is, um, one plus one and actually the best seats are in the back of the airplane. Every seat's a window seat and an aisle seat. Um, we, uh, we actually, again, there's magic that happens when design and when designers think like engineers and engineers think like designers.

1:13:27So one of the things we did is we changed the structural frame spacing on the fuselage to line up with the interior. So the windows always line up with the seats. And this is, you know, this is not done today. And we have that sometimes you get lucky and there's a window where you want the window to be. Sometimes it's like, well, the window is kind of like halfway between rows and you can't get a good view. And what's the reason for that in a Boeing plane? The interior and the airplane itself are developed independently by different companies. And there's a lot of principal agent kind of problems.

1:14:02Yeah, got it. So I end up with two windows angled slightly weirdly and someone else ends up with no windows or whatever. That's interesting. Right. Yeah. Versus we design the interior and the airplane together. In terms of the actual design, we spent a lot of time sort of talking about the different technical considerations, regulatory considerations, and all that stuff. As you moved into the consumer experience, how opinionated were you about these things? Did you bring in different consultants or different hiring once you realized the commercial viability and you started to make plans for the actual commercial availability?

1:14:39We built a design team that had never done an airplane before. We brought in a few consultants that had. So they would teach us what we didn't know about, say, certification for crash worthiness. But mostly, it was me and a handful of really great designers thinking very aspirationally about what we could create and just really sweating the details. One of my favorite days at Boom is when I go from a deep technical meeting where I'm just working with a team on, say how we design the approach to landing for quiet operation and without compromising high speed performance. It's like a fascinating little technical problem right in there.

1:15:23And it's like right at the intersection of regulation and engineering and pilot experience. And then I go to the next meeting and we're looking at a mock-up of the windows. And we're talking about the design of the interior and how the airplane sidewall interfaces with the window and how we can reduce seams and gaps to create a visual experience that is far more tranquil. And so there is, one of the things I just very much love about this company is there is a lot of art and design and ineffability. How do we make it a sensory experience that's pleasant? How do we make this an oasis in the cacophony that is an airport?

1:16:09and also there's just like the most awesome physics and engineering and manufacturing um and that all can be in you know all can be in one day and the magic happens the more these are threads that are woven together and cross-pollinate and uh the more we you know like one of our big things is no silos and uh i i expect every person at boom to be not just be an expert in their own discipline, but to be curious about every other one. This is, again, a difference between physical products and software. Everything's a trade-off. If we make the fuselage wider, it will create more aerodynamic drag and fuel economy will get worse, range of the airplane gets worse, and the required fares go up.

1:17:00So there's a tension between making the airplane bigger and more spacious and making it more cost effective. And you could look at this as a tug of war, or you could look at it as what we call invent together. And invent together is one of our five values. And it means everybody on the team has the obligation to teach what they know, and to learn from what their peers know, and a belief that when there is a shared understanding of every side of every trade-off, that's where the magic gets found. And this thing I'm not quite telling you about the front cabin of the airplane came out of one of these, where it's just like, when I saw it, there was like a no way.

1:17:42Wait a minute, that could really work? We've talked about the initial going and meeting the gentleman from SpaceX and the cascading effects of trying to find five and then five along the way. 11 years in, you've had to retain these people or different people. With different points of validation from the outside and probably different people feeling like they were making a ton of progress or maybe like where is this going at different points in the journey. I'm curious on the talent retention side. What have you learned about keeping people going through what probably has felt like manic episodes at different points along the way?

1:18:27Boy, we could do like probably three podcasts just on this question because I've made plenty of mistakes along the way and I've also learned some important lessons. I'll share a couple. So one is what we're doing requires a lot of perseverance and a lot of grit. And rational people will give up if they don't care about the mission because it's just too tough. And so one of the most important things we've done all along the way is to select for people who really, really care about delivering mainstream supersonic flight. If they don't and they're sane, they're going to leave and go to something far easier.

1:19:05So that's one. The other was less obvious. It's about burnout. So I'll tell you the story of how I learned the lesson. This was 2020. we were about to roll out the XB1 airplane and, you know, to, to plan a proper, proper event. You know, we had to call the shot on when rollout was going to be months in advance. So you could do all the media planning and all the, all the event prep for it. So we called the shot, I think it was October 20th and the airplane wasn't ready when we called the shot. So we had to, you know, work like crazy to get this to be ready. And the engineers were working like crazy.

1:19:48The people on the shop floor were working seven-day weeks, 12-hour days, at literally polishing the airplane. If you go back and look at the reveal video in XB1, we revealed it in a light box with these long, skinny light bars. And those are the least forgiving lighting environment for a physical product. If there's any surface imperfection, it will be really obvious. So people are literally polishing the airplane. and an insane amount of effort. And so we had an awesome event. And I said, all right, everybody take a week off. Because then we're going to come back. And the next job is to fly the airplane.

1:20:29And they came back. And morale, which had been really high, was suddenly in the tank. And at first I was like, WTF people? Like, you just got a bunch of external validation. The world is so excited about what we're doing. and I gave you all a week off. So what are you telling me you're burned out for? And at first I was like very upset. And what I realized was that what everyone tells you about burnout is actually not what burnout really is. Burnout is not, I'm working too hard. And in fact, people, teams can work extreme high intensities for long periods of time without being burned out. So long as there is a believable, tangible goal that is within what I call their gratification window.

1:21:19And I think as humans, we all have a gratification window. Some people have long gratification windows. Some people have short gratification windows. But it's how far away can a motivating goal be for me to believe in it and for it to actually motivate me? And what we went from was It's like, oh, it is a couple months to weeks away from a very important deadline that I know if I work really hard I can hit to, ooh, this airplane that we just rolled out needs a lot of work before it's really ready to fly. I don't even know how to get my head around that plan. And so the solution was we engineered something called mission success events, which is basically every roughly month, there were one or two major milestones that the team could rally around and celebrate and enjoy.

1:22:15and we still do this today and one of the things is a mission success event is not just celebrated by the team that did it but it's celebrated by the whole company and we try to have maybe like three a month across the whole company and everyone gets together and celebrates and it's a whole company victory and so there is a very long marathon divided into sprints and And you can think of it as you get to take a shot at the end of every sprint, sometimes literally. We've spent a lot of time talking about all the different component parts and developing airlines and all of that. Recently, obviously, there's been the implications of tariffs kind of roiling through the economy.

1:23:01I get the feeling you have opinions about different elements of this. So one, can you share, we were talking a little bit before about the bitter pill element of what tariffs maybe will accomplish? Yeah, I've changed my mind a lot on this. I think I booted up very much an unabashedly free trade, pro-globalization. Let's have one big happy world. We embrace comparative advantage. Not everything needs to be built in any one place. The world's a better place like that. And I think I'm on this multi-year journey of realizing that the world is – that is definitely the world I want to live in, but it's not the world we actually live in.

1:23:46You know, Russia invaded Ukraine. China has an explicit goal of taking over Taiwan. We lived for, you know, post-World War II, post-Cold War, a few decades of relative peace. But the world is not a safe place. Not every country is free, and there are real-life bad guys. And what has happened is let's go back to World War II. The way we won World War II was not by having a bunch of defense companies ready to go or having a big stockpile of weapons. We had no defense companies, and we had no stockpiles. But what we had was the best commercial industrial base in the world. And companies like Boeing and Douglas pivoted into defense products.

1:24:43Ford retooled, and they built fighters and bombers and tanks. And we outproduced the Axis, and we won. And then we lost our way. We went into this defense. uh we i think eisenhower very appropriately warned about the military industrial complex we you know we put the defense industrial base and corporate welfare um defense programs became as much as anything jobs programs uh we got you know really fat and dumb uh in a shooting war with china we'd run out of stockpiled cruise missiles in eight days and it would take another two years to get one. And meanwhile, the efficient, agile industrial base has left America, and it's gone to China.

1:25:34And I find this incredibly scary. And it's happened in a lot of industries. Aviation, we all know what happened with chips. Chips went to Asia. It's a huge problem, very hard to get them back. And we are watching right now the same thing happen in slow motion with aviation. But China today is shipping a 737 clone. They are working on a 787 clone, and they just announced last weekend, the next thing after that, yep, it's a supersonic passenger plane. And Boeing, on the other hand, America has not shipped a new airliner in decades. The 787 launched in 2004. Nothing new. And pretty soon the world will be first Chinese knockoff airplanes that every other country will buy because they're cheap.

1:26:33We can tear off them in the US, but you can't stop that internationally. And then And then we'll be always surprised that they've caught up with us technologically in their head. And I cannot overemphasize the importance of this. Boeing is the number one US exporter. A quarter of all Air Force airplanes are modified commercial airplanes. So if we don't have next generation airplanes, not only do we not have the exports and the economics, we don't have the next generation defense platforms. This is how we get our tankers. This is how we get our military transports. even some of our spy planes are modified commercial airplanes so um okay you asked about tariffs um i think the most important thing here is re-industrialization and uh and in a world you know if we it sounds like mother temple pay but if we had world peace this actually wouldn't be important the planet could operate as one um but that is not the world we live in and uh we need to America needs the greatest industrial base on the planet.

1:27:37And I think it's urgent and important and that what we need to do is pull every lever completely simultaneously. So first off, we need to get out of our own way. All this stuff that makes it hard to build, all this stuff that takes a year to do permitting or more, got to get rid of that. Supersonic flight, we got to legalize it. Everything we can do that basically makes it more expensive to build here, we need to fix. We need to fix rapidly. We need to massively cut federal spending, which will cause more capital to flow into private markets where it can be deployed many more times more effectively than any government ever could.

1:28:18And then we need to create economic... And this is the part, I know it's controversial, and I used to be on the exact opposite side of this issue. By the way, I'm still with you. I haven't disagreed with anything you've said yet. I have a feeling I'm about to. Okay. um you know i i started off thinking you know i was in the tariffs are really dumb camp and i am uh uh i am now in the this problem is so urgent and important that we need we need to be able to do painful things that that accelerate the transition and um and so you know i i don't think the the tariffs that we have as of like i don't know this morning um are the right ones long term I don't think they're going to stay that way either.

1:28:59But I think what we need to do is accelerate that shift towards re-industrialization. And this is one of several levers that will contribute. And by the way, many of these are painful levers. I think it's a bitter tasting medicine. And I also think it's temporary. It's a little bit of like economic chemo. And it sucks. But then it will work its way through markets. the economy will get realigned. And I think, I don't know, I shouldn't put a timeline on this, but I'm very optimistic that things look very, very different 12 to 24 months from now than they do today. And the tariffs specifically as a mechanism, the broad-based thing that we've seen over the course of the last whatever period of time, I guess as an accelerant to this, How do you think about that and the inputs and the puts and takes that kind of come with it?

1:29:57I think one of the things that is important to realize is we're also seeing that there are different ways you can plot your way through this, right? Like one is a very surgical approach where, you know, you're like, ah, so maybe we should figure out exactly which products should be tariffed. Let's make sure we don't tariff like industrial equipment coming into the U.S. from Europe. let's maybe finish goods out of China in some circumstances, but not the critical minerals. There's a surgical approach to this. A lot of people say, the surgical approach makes so much more sense. By the way, it would also take forever to figure out.

1:30:33And I think what is very Trumpian, I think very Muskian leadership is, someone once described Elon's management cell to me as management by thermonuclear explosion. blow everything up and then fix it. And I think that's a bit of what we have going on now. There is a view that this is so urgent and important that we will make big blunt moves, and then we'll figure it out, and it will get refined. And that drives a lot of chaos, and you have to be willing to tolerate wild volatility in the stock markets. I think that the theory is that this will result in actually getting to the best configuration faster.

1:31:15I certainly understand the argument for the surgical mode. And I think we will end up in the surgical state. But we are following a very chaotic path to get to that state. And is the implication of all of that, therefore, as you sort of talk all that through, is that it might be net detrimental to the overall US economy in terms of just pure GDP, cost of goods sold being as low as they are. But in terms of the ability to withstand shocks and the long-term potential resiliency of the United States, it's just mission critical. So if that's a trade-off, we should make it. Let's talk about the end state.

1:31:59I think it starts by, let's get really clear on the end state. And I think people should be able to agree on the end state. And then we can have reasonable debates about what is the best path to the end state. In my view, the end state is, again, we have to remember the world is not peaceful. If the world is peaceful, a different end state is better. But okay, great. So basically what there needs to be is America needs to be a free country that is the best in the world at making things. physical products, digital products, inventing the future. And by best, I mean, we're going to be really efficient.

1:32:34We need all the economic incentive to be efficient and be good and be innovative and to move fast. And I would just add the distinction, important things. I think we should be the best at making important things. Which things are unimportant? I don't know. I don't think t-shirts are particularly important. I don't think, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different widgets that don't necessarily feel particularly important to me. Toys don't feel particularly important to me. Don't you have a little boy on the way? I do. I do. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think we need to be the best toy manufacturer in the world.

1:33:05I actually profoundly disagree.

1:33:09One of the great things about toys is they need to be mass produced at low price points for families. And the manufacturing technology that enables scale production of toys might also be really important in wartime. It could be, but it's going to be more expensive. Why? To do it domestically will just be more expensive. Well, why? Because we will pay workers more here than we pay to get goods imported from another country. Let's keep asking why recursively until we eliminate the root causes of cost. People in Vietnam are willing to accept lower wages for their jobs because of cost of living versus people in the US.

1:33:50So let's invest heavily in robotics. Let's make Americans the best leveraged workers. Let's effectively promote every American into management and they can manage a whole bunch of robots and be far more productive than somebody sewing by hand in Vietnam. It sounds great. I agree with you. Over what period of time, I guess, is the possibility of it? I don't know if anybody's smart enough to put a number on that. I'm certainly not. Yeah. But I think that's the sooner we get there, the better. And this is, you know, it won't be easy, but there is a much, much better future that we can create here.

1:34:23But we have to be willing to tolerate some disruption on the way there, or it might take too long. And again, if it weren't for China, I would have a very different view on this. And a lot less urgency would exist. And therefore, the surgical approach would make a lot more sense. Well, I have a feeling we probably could do another hour or two just on this topic. But Blake, I really appreciate you doing this. This was a lot of fun. It's a super impressive business you're building, and I'm glad we were able to dive deep into it. I really enjoyed the conversation, Logan. Thank you so much. Thank you.