Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl has battled doubters, delays and other challenges to focus on his dream of supersonic flight. Now comes the real test.
By Diane Brady, Forbes Staff
Ask Blake Scholl about how Boom Supersonic is doing today and he’ll respond by telling you where he hopes his supersonic jet startup will be tomorrow. It’s a well-honed vision: “To build a future where more people travel more often. To do that, we need flights that are significantly faster, ultimately more affordable and a big leap forward in sustainability.”
“Imagine Tokyo to Seattle in 4.5 hours, imagine crossing the Atlantic in 3.5 to 4.5 hours,” says Scholl. “Imagine being able to vacation in Sydney in the time it would take you to get to Honolulu today.”
That’s the dream. Getting there, of course, is another matter. First is the technical challenge of transforming supersonic air travel, the limitations of which were famously illustrated by the Concorde, which went out of service 20 years ago. It was criticized as too expensive, loud (with shock waves that could shatter glass), fuel-guzzling and potentially unsafe following a crash that killed 113 people. “The story of Concorde was really about amazing technology but not a product that worked for the market,” says Scholl. “It’s definitely not easy.”
But that didn’t stop Scholl from launching Boom in 2014 to create his own supersonic jet in 2014. Although he’d earned a private pilot license in 2008, he came to aviation and aerospace as a former software engineer and co-founder of a mobile technology startup that he sold to Groupon in 2012. After studying the science behind supersonic travel, he felt the technical challenges had been overblown. As Scholl explains, “I just found a bunch of stale conventional wisdom that didn’t stand up to even basic analysis that anybody with a spreadsheet and a web browser could do.”
While Boom has made a number of technical advances, though, it’s also encountered its own challenges in developing Overture, a 65-88 seat passenger supersonic jet — from lapsed partnerships to growing competition. Through it all, Scholl has to engage employees, investors, vendors, regulators and consumers on a journey that could take at least 16 years from launch to execution So he’s focused on wins along the way.
“I’m really excited by our progress,” says Scholl, adding that test flights of its XB-1 experimental prototype aircraft could be weeks away. “I get a chill as I say that because it’s gonna be a really big moment.”
Scholl argues that “ultimately supersonic flight could be less expensive than subsonic economy” fares. For more on how he hopes to achieve that, click on the video above.
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