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

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:08Speaker 01

  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. The world needs supersonic flight. Passengers deserve it.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Please welcome Blake Scholl.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  This is insane. But imagine, 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?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  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 startup. Not one that you'd want to fly on anyway.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  I took that a little personally.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  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's, that is in fact a supersonic airliner mock-up made from cardboard plywood and seats from Office Depot.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Something that the big companies would 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.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Some of them stood up and some of them even jumped up and down.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:56Speaker 02

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

• 4:02Speaker 00

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

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Concorde showed us the future of passenger flight in 1969.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  In 2003, we lost all that.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  The sound barrier was back. But we are still pioneers and humanity will always want to reach higher. A small team with a big dream. In 2025, XB1 became the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  You are go for a trail to Mach 1.1.

• 4:48Speaker 02

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

• 4:57Speaker 02

  And now the sound barrier can stay broken.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Thank 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.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  But 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.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's unanimous.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  And it got out of Senate Commerce unanimously recently and now we have to get through the rest of the Senate and I think we should just do it unanimously, right? Cause that's badass. So, okay, so it's a full speed ahead, right? And like we get to look forward to supersonic passenger flights soon. But wait, there was actually a problem. Not 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, 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, turns out that effort's actually working.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  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. So 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, 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?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  So our philosophy is the 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, 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 make as an engine, actually turns out to be the thing that makes

• 8:12Speaker 01

  a supersonic startup financially viable. Cause it turns out if we take our supersonic engine technology, this 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 instead we put a generator in the back, it does this.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  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. I think we all know that water thing is kind of a bullshit objection, but why not make it go away?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  So 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 in 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 stand. And the factory you're looking at here made its first parts last week, and it will scale to making multiple gigawatts per year.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  And over the next five years, we aim to add 10-plus gigawatts to the grid. What 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, a more connected world, and American leadership in aviation.

• 10:28Jason Calacanis?

  Nicely done, Blake. We're going to talk for a second. 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.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  A date and a number, right. These are my favorite questions.

• 10:48Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sure your board asks once in a while.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, the thing about faster flight is everybody wants it so long as it's safe, comfortable, and affordable. And Concorde is really like zero out of three.

• 10:59Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  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, and the break-even fare is about $3,500.

• 11:09Jason Calacanis?

  Each way?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Round trip.

• 11:12Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Round trip. That's the break-even. And so, of course, it will probably go for more than that.

• 11:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  But any dollar above that, United's making some good money.

• 11:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fantastic.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And when? Our goal is four years, but I think, you know, a thing 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 are, 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.

• 11:39Jason Calacanis?

  So we're looking at potentially 2030, give or take Blake versus, say, Elon timing. So 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 of 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?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  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, it's kind of a normal strength boom.

• 12:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  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, you know, 50% faster than how we can fly today. So you can't go full speed boomless, but you could still go fast enough that you could leave New York, say, at 9:00 AM, and land in San Francisco around 9:30 AM. So it's still going to be pretty, 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.

• 12:50Jason Calacanis?

  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? Do you have customers for this product already? And how many? How much is coming in? What's the, let's talk dollars here, because running a, building the Concorde is quite expensive, as Mr. Bezos pointed out to you, but this seems like a money printing business. Is it printing money?

• 13:16Speaker 01

  It's an incredible money printing business. I mean, I've never seen demand like this for anything else in my life.

• 13:21Jason Calacanis?

  How many orders? Give us, you get 10 customers, 100?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:31Jason Calacanis?

  Did you talk to Elon about it? Is he interested for the Colossus?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  You should ask Elon.

• 13:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, that's a yes. Okay, good enough. Do you ever think that, like, 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?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  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 is never going to be the blocker. And so Boom is the company, the airplane is Overture. We wanted, we wanted an innovative brand for the company and something for the airplane itself that would have real gravitas.

• 14:13Jason Calacanis?

  There are some individuals who might look at this and say, any chance at a private aviation option in the 2.0? Is there, is that a good business for you to be in to provide, you know, compete with Gulfstream and Falcon?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Well, I hope the private jet guys will make a supersonic jet. They should. If they don't, I guess we'll do it.

• 14:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  But let's, let's talk about the future. I mean, the, 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 STS rocket. And I'm just the person I am, so I got the smallest little rocket that had the big D motor in it. And so that thing goes, and it ends up in a tree three fields over. And I thought it was 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.

• 15:10Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Because I had done nothing but watched rocket landing videos with her, like, literally her entire life. And what I realized is for supersonic, there's an analogous thing. 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.

• 15:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  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. That's when we've won.

• 15:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  And so that will take many generations of airplanes, but we're not giving up.

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. Final question. The company's now getting close to 10 years.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  12, in fact.

• 15:57Jason Calacanis?

  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, we talk a little less about it, but, thank you. Talk about how this administration has, 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 it's a big issue for your company specifically.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, first off, I think it's really cool that supersonic flight is not a partisan issue, and that we're 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 DC that night to start the legalization campaign. By the time I landed, I had an invitation to the West Wing, so that's Tuesday.

• 17:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  By Thursday, our airplane model has made it to the Oval Office. And by the way, it's still there.

• 17:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  It's like one of the greatest product placements of all time. Like, there's a supersonic jet 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.

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  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.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Sounds fast.

• 17:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's a Biden joke. All right, let's give it up for Blake one more time.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  All right.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  Great job.