HIBT Lab! Boom Supersonic: Blake Scholl

Commercial air travel has been stuck below the sound barrier for about 20 years, since the Concorde’s last flight in 2003. While the technology exists to fly about twice as fast as we do now, conventional wisdom in the aerospace industry is that supersonic flight simply doesn’t make economic sense. Blake Scholl disagrees... This week on How I Built This Lab, Blake tells Guy how Boom Supersonic is working to revive the dream of supersonic air travel—and already has orders from major airlines like United and American for their first supersonic aircraft, the Overture. Plus, Blake describes his transformation from tech startup founder to aviation leader and discusses how founder-led companies can foster innovation in commercial flight. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So imagine getting on a jet in New York and arriving in Paris just three hours later. Well, for a long time, that was possible. From the mid-'70s to the early 2000s, the Concorde made the dream of supersonic commercial flight a reality. It would whisk passengers across oceans in half the time it takes today. The problem was, it was really, really expensive. It takes a ton of fuel to fly that fast. And the planes had to be so skinny and aerodynamic that they couldn't carry as many passengers as a typical airliner. And so the Concorde just didn't make economic sense. Now, it's been 20 years since the last commercial supersonic flight happened in 2003.

• 5:57Guy Raz?

  But today's guest, Blake Scholl, hopes to change that. His company, Boom Supersonic, is designing a new generation of supersonic airplanes for commercial flight. And they've announced partnerships with several major airlines, who hope to have those planes flying with passengers by the end of this decade. Growing up in Ohio, Blake was one of those kids who was obsessed with airplanes. He loved to draw pictures of them. He loved to watch them fly. And he would dream about building them. As a teenager, that fascination gave way to an interest in computers and other technologies, leading to an early career as a software engineer at Amazon.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I remember my first meeting with Bezos was when I was, I think I was 22.

• 6:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And it was, um, my, my boss's boss had told me, hey, Jeff has strong opinions about this project you're about to start and you should go meet him and listen to him and earn his trust. So he doesn't micromanage your stuff. And so I was, I was 22. I was nervous as all get out. This was right when the Segway had come out, if we can remember that.

• 7:03Guy Raz?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And, and Amazon back then was the exclusive retailer for the Segway. And so it's five o'clock on a Friday, me and my direct manager and the CEO of the company.

• 7:12Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  And Jeff walks in and he's like, hey, guys, want to ride my Segway? And we spent the first 30 minutes of that meeting, um, just going up and down the halls of Amazon headquarters on Jeff's Segway.

• 7:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that sounds fun.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it was a total blast. I can't imagine a better icebreaker.

• 7:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  That got me to calm down and be able to really engage with him.

• 7:33Guy Raz?

  So you ended up, um, working at Amazon for five years, um, and, and left in 2006 to go to a startup called Pelago, which I guess was like a kind of early social media mobile app?

• 7:47Speaker 01

  It was, think of it as Yelp plus Google Maps plus Foursquare.

• 7:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  On a Motorola Razr in 2006.

• 7:56Guy Raz?

  I'm, I'm already overwhelmed. Too much information. I don't think I could handle all that.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  That was exactly the story of the failure of that product. You nailed it. I think one of the mistakes we made at Pelago was trying to build a product that had all the maturity of what Amazon was after a decade on day one. And it was, it was overwhelming to develop and it was overwhelming for customers. And you know, there's so many, so many good ideas. Had we just picked one, it could have been a massive success, but we tried to do too many.

• 8:23Guy Raz?

  Right. Um, yeah, I had, I had a Razr myself. I kind of miss it now because I, I look at my smartphone too much. I wish I had the Razr. Just answer calls and send texts.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  It's a simpler time.

• 8:33Guy Raz?

  Simpler times. All right. From, from what I understand, this is around the time while you were there at this company Pelago, that you kind of really got interested in flying.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Well, I started flying for fun a few years earlier when I was in college. I remember in high school, a classmate was getting flying lessons and I remember being really jealous. And I was like, man, I want to go do that. And when I did, one of my internships in college and I was like one exit down the highway in the San Francisco Bay area from a little airport and I'm like, wait a minute, I can get flying lessons. And so I think I got like 10 hours of flying lessons, something like that. And I didn't come back to it until, until kind of the time period we were talking about when I was at Pelago. And started, you know, to finish my pilot's license and kind of just got more interested in how airplanes work. And that was about the time period where I set a lifetime goal of flying supersonic.

• 9:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so you're, you know, got your pilot's license and you're working at the startup, which you eventually leave. And you start up your own startup called Chemo Labs, which was, I guess, was an app with like a barcode and mobile payment services. What, tell me about Chemo Labs.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  To be honest about it, it was not, not really a success. We started with what I thought I was good at, rather than what I thought should exist in the world. And so my, hey, I know e-commerce from Amazon.

• 9:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And I know mobile social from my time at Pelago. So what should I do? I should do mobile e-commerce because like surely that's going to be a thing.

• 10:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  But I've come to believe that's actually a backwards way to think about it. Because skills and knowledge are highly variable. Like you can learn new things, but passion is a lot less variable. And so I went where I thought I knew stuff, rather than trying to build something that I really wanted to exist in the world. And so the, the main thing we built was this thing called Barcode Hero that was kind of a barcode scanning game. And then when you're shopping in a store, you could go scan a barcode and it would like pull up all the other content that, that people would put in and help you figure out like, you know, what headphones you want to buy or whatnot.

• 10:42Guy Raz?

  Right. Well, you did end up selling the company. It was acquired by Groupon, you know, obviously a famous sort of, I don't know if cautionary tales totally fair, but I mean, it was a massive unicorn, went public, it was valued like 30 billion at one point. And then, you know, just, just declined in its value quickly as people realized you could replicate the model. I think at one point like Google maybe had offered to buy Groupon. Which they did not accept. So you were there, you were there when all this is happening, when it was like, kind of in, in a little bit of freefall, I think.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  In a way, I mean, my synthesis of Groupon is it's a story of massively lost potential. In my view, that company had all the potential to be worth 30 or 100 billion dollars and really to have earned it. But they made kind of one critical mistake, which was taking the company public before they were operationally ready to do it. Not because the business was in freefall, but for just dumb reasons. Like, the right data wasn't in the accounting system. And so it was, it was just really stumbling over their own internal ability. And then so what happens is now they're missing earnings, and they're missing earnings, and they're missing earnings. And there's, there's pressure from Wall Street. The visionary CEO got fired.

• 11:59Guy Raz?

  That's Andrew Mason, right?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  That's Andrew, Andrew Mason, yeah. And what, what Groupon, I think, could have been, there, there's so many pitches I've heard in, in local commerce that require solving a chicken and egg problem. You have to have a digital connection to the consumer and a digital connection to the merchant. And that's very hard to bootstrap. But Groupon with the digital coupon thing, figured out how to bootstrap it. And they had, they had a massive collection of chickens and eggs. And Andrew Mason had a really compelling vision to turn that into something amazing. Like, imagine you could book a reservation on your phone. And when you book the reservation, it says, hey, you know, would you like a picture of margaritas and calamari on the table when you get there? And you say, yes, obviously. And then, you know, the, the digital connection would go all the way into the back end of the restaurant. So when your reservation is coming up, you know, the bartender starts

• 12:43Speaker 01

  making your drinks, and the kitchen starts firing the calamari. You show up, it lands on the table as you sit down. And then, you know, when you, when you're done with your meal, you get up and leave, and it just builds your Groupon account. And that's an experience that like, still doesn't exist. And, and Groupon has sort of collected all the sort of key infrastructure pieces to make this a reality. They, they kind of bought my company for some of the pieces. And we went and we bought another point of sale company to do this.

• 13:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  And then, and then Andrew got fired. And, and the focus really shifted on, well, we just got to focus on the next quarter.

• 13:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And then the business became what it's caricatured for, which is this not differentiated internet coupon business. But like, boy, it's missed potential.

• 13:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I noticed on your LinkedIn page, it says, 2012, 2014 works at Groupon. And you write,

• 13:33Guy Raz?

  Right under it, there's nothing like working on internet coupons to make you yearn to build something you truly love, which was a bit of a chuckle. And Groupon, obviously, a smart company and offered an interesting product, but that wasn't really where your heart was. And I wonder when you, when your previous company was acquired by Groupon, obviously, you make a commitment to stay with the acquiring company oftentimes. But were you already at that point thinking about something in aviation?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yes and no. I had this thing on my to-do list that had been on there for years called figure out how to start an aviation company. And I ordered some books to read, some textbooks on airplane design. And honestly, I did nothing with it. It sat there on my to-do list with nothing but books ordered that were sitting collecting dust on my bookshelf. So I knew in the back of my mind that kind of one day I would love to find a way to intersect my career with flight because I was so passionate about it. And I also knew that there was just so much that was broken in air travel. Like I would get on an airplane and just as a thought experiment, I would say, man, what would this thing be like if Steve Jobs

• 14:46Speaker 01

  and Johnny Ive had designed it?

• 14:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it would be awesome.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  It'd be totally awesome. But just even asking that question makes it so much easier to see just how bad it really is today and how much opportunity there is. And so all this is sort of rattling around the back of my head. But I wasn't, at that point in my life, I wasn't doing anything with it.

• 15:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, air travel is a miracle. You're up in a metal tube flying across the country or the world, and it is incredible. But that technology, I mean, jet travel hasn't changed, right? It hasn't changed in 50 years. It's basically been updated, made more efficient and modernized, but it's the same basic principle. You know, there's a jet engine, you get in the plane, and then it takes off and you land, and that's it.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, I find it very paradoxical because on one hand, it is this amazing thing that it exists. I mean, we take off on the runway accelerating to hundreds of miles per hour, climbing into the sky in near perfect safety. We get to look down at that view that humans were not born to have, that frankly, no bird can have, where we get to take in all the natural beauty of our world as well as what we as humanity have created. And that singular vantage point provided by the airplane is this amazing, very visceral manifestation of what humanity has accomplished. And yet, on the other hand, like you said, it hasn't gotten any better in half a century. And in fact, it's gotten worse in a lot of ways. And so, in my mind, it represents both the pinnacle

• 16:19Speaker 01

  of human achievement, but also this very weird thing where we've stopped and gone backwards.

• 16:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, if you think about innovation, you know, we've had both Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, and David Neilman of JetBlue on the show in the past. And they were both true innovators, right? I mean, not necessarily around aircraft technology, but around how to make air travel cheaper and more accessible and more efficient. I mean, the main thing that has changed in the last 50 years is that more people can fly because it's cheaper, right? You can pack more people in and it's more efficient. But it's certainly not a pleasant experience to fly on a commercial airplane today.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we've turned something that, in my view, people should be incredibly inspired by and look forward to into an experience that most of us dread. And it doesn't have to be that way. It's solvable. But you were talking about how Herb and Dave Neilman, and there've been others who have been great innovators in making travel more accessible, more affordable. You know, they've both innovated with experience. But if you look at the history of entrepreneurship and aviation broadly, there was kind of a first era, starting from the Wright brothers and going until the 1960s, where there were entrepreneurs focused on the airplanes themselves. And then in the 1960s, basically, all the entrepreneurs in the aircraft companies retired.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And if we look at that entire now more than 100 year history of aviation, I think it shows a really interesting pattern that I bet we could find in other industries as well, which is founder led companies tend to push what the product can do.

• 17:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  And then when the founders retire, what happens in those companies? Well, they promote the most successful executive.

• 18:03Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  That reported to them, who by definition is really different than the founder, because they had to compliment the founder.

• 18:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  And so what do they do? They go in optimization mode. And so if you look at all commercial aviation over the last half century, what have we done? We've optimized, like, you know, Google a picture of Boeing's first airliner, the 707, and put that right next to a picture of the 787. And if you're not an airplane nerd, it's actually kind of hard to spot the differences.

• 18:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  It's optimized. It's a much better, more efficient, safer machine that does exactly the same job. But it hasn't gotten better at what job it can do.

• 18:38Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back in just a moment, more from Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 22:26Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm talking with Blake Scholl, CEO and founder of Boom Supersonic. All right, let's talk about what you do now. You decided to start an aviation company, and not just any company, but one that is going to revive supersonic flight, which, I mean, unless you're in the military, I think the last opportunity to fly faster than the speed of sound would have been on the Concorde, which was like put out of service in 2003. How did you come to the decision to start such an ambitious project like this?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  In a sort of roundabout way, I started out thinking I would convince myself to not start it. I wanted to work on a new startup. I realized that no matter what startup I founded, I would work really hard at it, and I would be sort of at my personal red line regardless of what I'm doing. And so I wanted to pick something that would be very much the opposite of my first company, where I would never get up in the morning and think, why in the world did I get into this? And so I kind of took a deep breath and said, okay, I got to look at this supersonic thing. And I thought I would get two weeks into the research and understand why nobody was doing it, and then move on to something that was less pie in the sky. But instead, what I found was a bunch of stale, conventional wisdom.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  There were zillions of articles and YouTube videos out there that purported to explain why airplanes didn't fly faster. And one of the themes was, it was always a qualitative answer to a quantitative question. And so people would say things like, speed inherently has to cost more.

• 24:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  And if you can't fly supersonic over land, the market's not big enough.

• 24:05Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And people won't pay for speed. And but, you know, hang on, those are all qualitative statements about quantitative phenomenon. Okay, people clearly do pay for speed. It's why direct flights are preferred over connecting flights.

• 24:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, okay, speed is going to come with some kind of a increased fuel burn because physics, but, okay, how much? And how does that relate to all these other factors? And how might it be improved? And, okay, there are some constraints on where you can fly supersonic. With those constraints, how big is the market? And so I started building models of what the airplane ought to be capable of.

• 24:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  And, you know, downloaded a whole bunch of like global air travel data, it's sort of crunching it to say, okay, well, how much of this could benefit from supersonic? And, you know, by the middle of 2014, I had two things that were just like really shocking. One was sort of a very simple model of the airplane, which said that we should be able to make a supersonic airplane that would be profitable at business class fares. And also this market model that said, even with the constraints on being able to fly supersonic over oceans, but not overpopulated areas, such a machine would have a very large market, just taking people who are flying first or business internationally today and letting them get there in half the time at the same price points.

• 25:27Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  And so at that point, I was like, I don't understand why no one's doing this. And I took both of those things to a professor at Stanford who had done a bunch of supersonics research. And I was like, dude, can you look at this and check my math? Because I cannot possibly be the human that was the first one to build this model.

• 25:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  That's not, that's not my self-concept. And I've been in aviation for like a hot second with no, no background, really. And he looks at it and he's like, Blake, if you're going to do this, you should really try harder because a bunch of your assumptions are conservative.

• 25:56Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  And I remember walking out of his office and thinking, this comes down to courage. Like, when I look in the mirror, I have a hard time seeing myself as like, oh yeah, I'm the guy who created supersonic flight in a mainstream way. Like that just, like that, just the ego in that statement is insane. But it seems like there's a possibility here and I could either be scared of it and run from it, or I could say, I'm just going to give everything I've got and find out what I'm capable of.

• 26:27Guy Raz?

  Wow. So basically this technology, right, with Concorde that was kind of put out to pasture in 2003, that was it. I mean, the, the story was, yeah, it didn't quite work. It was too expensive. It was inefficient, um, you know, not good for the environment and it just didn't make sense. But when you started crunching numbers, particularly transatlantic business class flights, you saw that essentially you could make a much more efficient plane in 2014 than you could in 2003. You started to put this puzzle together and you came to the conclusion that this actually can be done. You can actually build a faster plane, more efficient, and it could actually be.

• 27:08Guy Raz?

  Profitable.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I mean, that's right, but in a way it was easier than that because it wasn't 2014 versus 2003. It was 2014 versus 1962.

• 27:16Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  So, I mean, imagine if we'd stopped innovating in computers at the time of the Univac.

• 27:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And all we did is make them more efficient, but they were still kind of mainframes.

• 27:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And then someone pops up and says, could we have an iPhone?

• 27:30Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  But somehow all the component technology had evolved, then actually, oh, you could create the iPhone. And that's, and that's what, that's what was going on in aviation. Like, all the component technology did progress, impressively so, but nobody had put it together into a product with a different capability.

• 27:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so you are, you are not a mechanical engineer. You're obviously a smart guy and you're an engineer, but you know, like RJ Scaringe, the founder of Rivian, you know, he's a PhD in mechanical engineering. He wanted to build cars his whole life. Elon Musk is not a mechanical engineer. He runs a car company, but, so there are obviously examples of this. But I have to imagine that one of the first things you have to do is find somebody to work with you. Is that what you did?

• 28:17Speaker 01

  That was really the second thing, not the first thing. The first thing was really to just get educated myself.

• 28:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  And I remember doing this exercise where I said, okay, Blake, just imagine the year is 2050 and you're sitting on the beach, sipping Mai Tais, reading about how the world made the leap to supersonic. I mean, and first off, it's hard to imagine that it didn't. Like, it'd be really, really weird if like aviation just like permanently got stuck at 85% of the speed of sound and nobody ever broke through.

• 28:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so someone's going to break through. What does that story look like? You know, is it after, you know, a century of not doing it, Boeing or Airbus does it? No, that's not really how these things go in history. Okay, so it's probably a startup. And then I just started to imagine, what would the story of that startup have to look like? They have to put together a dream team. Because this is, this is hard to do and it's going to need the very best people. So ability to attract and retain great people is going to be fundamental to the success. And it's going to require a leader that deeply understands all the key pieces of the business, including the technology down to the physics.

• 29:22Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And so I look in the mirror and I'm like, I am currently not any of those things.

• 29:27Guy Raz?

  So you had to become that.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  I had to become it. And it was like, okay, Blake, have a very flexible concept of who you are. Your only shot at this is to morph yourself into the leader that this thing needs. And as I started recruiting, my favorite interview question was, teach me something. And so along the way, I learned a lot from those conversations and started hiring people who both deeply understood the technology of what they were doing, all the way down to first principles physics, and were also great communicators. And I think that those two things were really at the core of the early boom team and explain why we've been able to get as far with this as we have.

• 30:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. Let's just talk about how you actually build an airplane. I mean, where do you go? I mean, you had to build a prototype of a supersonic aircraft. It's not like, you know, we've had a lot of cosmetics companies on the show. It's not like going to a white label cosmetics plant and going, hey, build me this. Here's the 20 ingredients that I want in there and just come back to me in a month. Like, where do you start?

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Well, we started off with what the design was. And so it started off very digitally focused and we actually put a lot of attention on how we develop the airplane, not just actually going off and building something. So great software is loosely coupled. Like one piece of our code, if we change it, shouldn't affect what another piece of our code does. But great airplanes are very tightly coupled, highly integrated machines. The best wing structurally is thick, the best wing aerodynamically is thin. If we add more passengers, then all of a sudden, the whole airplane has to get bigger, the wing has to get stronger, the engines need more thrust, needs to carry more fuel, etc.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Et cetera, et cetera. And so for that reason, airplane design tends to be highly iterative. And historically, when design is very manual, the pace of iteration is slow. And so one of the early insights was that we wanted to really invest in digital design and optimization tools. And so we had this digital design path going. And then in parallel, we started building hardware. And that was really about getting calibration data for all the digital stuff. So along the way, we tested probably thousands of samples of carbon fiber composites and different ways to put it together, different ways to make a joint, ranges of temperatures. We started doing wind tunnel testing and all of that sort of data out of the world of atoms fed back into the world of bits

• 31:59Speaker 01

  so that our digital design tools could just get better and better and better. And then we could iterate much faster than we could kind of just building airplanes and throwing them away.

• 32:08Guy Raz?

  Let's talk about actually, because you have a prototype. And I think in October of 2020, you unveiled your first fully assembled prototype, the XP1. It's a smaller version of what you will eventually produce. But I mean, how is there like, how does it, how do you build that? I mean, do you guys have a warehouse that you, you know, you get component parts and you start to assemble it? Or is it built for you in another place and are you directing them? Like, who builds a supersonic aircraft prototype?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  So we put it all together ourselves. One of the things that makes this business possible is that the aerospace supply chain is pretty mature. And yeah, just to put this in context, this is the first independently developed supersonic jet ever. Like previously, it's been governments and military. So we were, we were first to say, hey, we're going to go do this. And we designed the whole airplane. And then to get it built, we teamed with suppliers to build components. And then we brought it all to our facility in Denver where we put it together. And so we have this roughly 50,000 square foot building that's going to part offices, part hangar. It was a supersonic jet factory. It's where we built the XP1, where we put it together ourselves.

• 33:18Guy Raz?

  Well, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll hear more from Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic in just a moment. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 34:57Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest is Blake Schulz. His company Boom Supersonic is looking to build a new generation of supersonic airplanes for commercial travel. All right, let's talk about this prototype because I know that you wanted to begin test flights in 2021, but it hasn't happened yet. This has not been through a test flight. What are the obstacles and hurdles that have prevented that prototype from flying?

• 35:24Speaker 01

  So where we are today is just a few months away from flying this bird. We finished late last year, our final Denver-based taxi test. And we've got a couple of things where we want to add some safety margin to the airplane. And then we're going to take it down to the Mojave Desert for a flight test, probably around the middle of this year. So, but you know, what you said is that this thing has taken a lot longer than we thought it would. And I think that's a combination of a few factors. One was, quite honestly, some naivete on my part. Like, I underestimated how hard this was. Yeah. Maybe I had to in order to decide to go do it. Right, I think so, yeah. But for better or worse, I thought this was easier than it actually was.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  And so, we said, we were sort of perennially optimistic about timeframe. And then we've learned some things along the way. And one of the big thematic learnings was, we chose to build a human piloted aircraft. This is not a drone. And we know the test pilots who are going to go fly it. And it's an extraordinarily complex machine. It's a new design airplane. The design's different from anything that's ever flown before. And so, it's really important that it be right, because it's life and death serious. Yeah. And so, many times along the way, we've had the opportunity to say, hey, is this good enough? Or do we think it needs to be better? And so, we've tested everything as we went along.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  And when we found opportunities to improve the safety profile of the airplane, we've done it. And then the other kind of dimension to it is like, we've been learning along the way. We, you know, if we sort of imagine, hey, it's a new company, first new commercial aircraft company of century. We're going to build a 65-passenger supersonic airliner that weighs several hundred thousand pounds and trust us will get it right the first time? Like, I don't even believe that. Yeah. And so, we did XB1 because we knew we would make mistakes. And we wanted to make the mistakes on a small, simpler airplane before we went and did the big airplane, because those learnings would be what would enable the big airplane overture to be a success. And so, yeah, we've made mistakes along the way. And that's a good thing, because we've learned.

• 37:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and the XB1, just to clarify, is the prototype. Overture is going to be the commercially developed plane that you'll eventually make. And I guess the XB1 is like a third the size of the Overture. I'm looking at a model of the Overture on your website. By the way, it's a beautiful plane. It's got four engines and it's a small plane, obviously. So how will Overture compare to the last commercial supersonic airplane, which, of course, as we've said, was the Concorde?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  So the size is relatively similar to Concorde from a kind of total weight of the airplane. But it's got a lot more range and it's got a lot better passenger comfort. Overture puts 65 passengers where Concorde put 100. So onboard the airplane, it's a lot more spacious, a lot more comfortable. We really want to build something that people are going to want to fly over and over again.

• 38:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  And Concorde, a lot of problems, but one of them was it wasn't affordable to very many people. A ticket had to be around $20,000. And you just can't find 100 people who want to pay 20 grand to go somewhere on very many routes. And so we said, look, ultimately, we want to make supersonic flight available to everybody who flies. We want flying fast to be less expensive than flying slow. That's the big driver. And then for Overture 1, we've said, look, we want to focus on business class. And so we've designed that airplane such that it will be profitable for airlines at fares a quarter of what was charged on Concorde.

• 39:07Guy Raz?

  So it'll be about $5,000.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  At $5,000, on most routes, it is very profitable for airlines.

• 39:14Guy Raz?

  And that's basically equivalent to a business class flight from London to New York, something like that.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the fares vary, but it's pretty common for people to pay five grand or sometimes more than that for a round trip ticket across the Atlantic. So five grand for supersonic. Most business travelers I've talked to are like, wow, that actually seems like a good deal.

• 39:35Guy Raz?

  All right, let's talk about range for a moment. I mean, the Concorde flew Paris, New York and London, New York by the end of its life cycle mainly. That was its route. Is this a plane that could fly Los Angeles to Hong Kong or San Francisco to Tokyo?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  So it has about 42, 50 nautical miles of range. And so what that means in practice is that just about the longest non-stop route would be Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours. And just pause on that for a second. Four and a half hours across the Pacific.

• 40:09Guy Raz?

  Now it takes, what, 10?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, roughly, you know, nine, 10. It depends which direction we're going, what the winds are, et cetera. But yeah, like roughly twice that. And that's fast enough that you can leave the US a whole day later to make a given meeting in Tokyo. It's just like much, much faster. And one of the things I think will be really interesting is how the airplane gets used on longer routes. Let's take a really painful example, like LA to Sydney. It was like 15, 16 hours today. Well, Overture can't do that nonstop. It has to stop for gas.

• 40:42Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  But even with the pit stop, it's going to be like eight and a half hours.

• 40:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  So you're on the ground for maybe 25, 30 minutes, something like that. And then you're back up and away and the refuel has, you know, it's the experiential equivalent of a little bit of turbulence in the middle of the flight because it's not interruptive to the experience.

• 40:59Guy Raz?

  All right. And now let's talk about the environmental side to it because you're talking about using sustainable aviation fuels. Tell me how this is going to, because you have a plan to be carbon neutral. So how, how do you make this flight substantially better than, than existing commercial flights?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Well, let's start with why. And it goes back to kind of what makes me get out of bed every morning. And I deeply believe that life happens in person, that more time spent in the same room with other people around the planet is not just good for business. It's not just good for, you know, being able to fall in love with somebody from any continent. It's going to be deeply transformative for cross-cultural understanding. You know, what happens when our kids grow up having spent time with people from every continent, not just kind of read about them or watch YouTube videos or whatever. So like enabling more in-person interaction matters. And so I actually believe in a future where there's a lot more travel than there is today.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  And that your speed and affordability and convenience are the big drivers of making it possible to travel more than we do today. So that brings us to sustainability because there are, you know, there are real concerns. Today aviation is about two, two and a half percent of global carbon emissions. But if we, you know, if we like 10 times the travel, like, wow, we took, we took a thing that we already needed to make smaller, we made it a lot bigger. And so it's not good enough, in my view, to just sort of optimize, focus on efficiency, kind of chip away a few percent at a time. We need to find a way to go all the way to carbon neutral so that that climate impacts are not a reason for people to avoid traveling. Okay. So how do you do that? You know, it's not batteries because batteries are just far too heavy. Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  So you want, you want the energy density of liquid hydrocarbons. But the, the exciting thing is they don't have to be sourced out of fossil fuels out of the ground. But there's sort of a new generation of fuel technology that's called power to liquid, that is basically a carbon sequestration based technology that you can use to create synthetic kerosene. And this stuff, it actually exists. It's scaling really rapidly. It's, so it's still early, but it's scaling really well. And then that, that technology, you know, because it's effectively powered out of atmospheric carbon, it can go all the way to net zero. And so this is what I think ultimately every long haul airplane is going to do. This is the way we decarbonize long haul air travel. One of the nice things about sustainable aviation

• 43:27Speaker 01

  fuel is it's backwards compatible, meaning it's chemically very similar to traditional fossil jet fuel. And so today's airplanes can do 50 50 of sustainable fuel and traditional fuel. Overture can do 100%. But the, the fact that there's some backwards compatibility here makes it far simpler to deploy. So every time we put sustainable aviation fuel in a new, in an airport, you know, the, the climate story out of that airport gets better. So your Overture is designed around sustainable aviation fuel. It's the first airliner that can accept 100% sustainable aviation fuel, not just blended down to 50 50. And for that reason, it can get all the way to net zero. And this, this is important to us. It's important to our customers. And when, when United Airlines ordered Overture, they made a public commitment

• 44:12Speaker 01

  to run it on 100% sustainable aviation fuel on a net zero carbon basis. And I, I find it personally just really exciting that the airplane that we all most want to fly on is also going to be the best one for the planet.

• 44:27Guy Raz?

  All right. So one of the main criticisms of supersonic air travel, as you know, is the noise, right? We've all heard of a sonic boom, right? This is extremely loud sound that a jet makes when it breaks a sound barrier. And I think it's why Concorde was limited to flying out of just a few airports by the end of its life. And it only flew at supersonic speeds over the ocean, right? So let's talk about the routes that you're hoping overture will fly. I mean, if you're going west from the US, you've got to fly out of LAX and Seattle. You mentioned San Francisco. You want to fly out of New York because New York, London, New York, Paris is a profitable route. And I know that you've

• 45:10Guy Raz?

  partnered with United, and obviously, Chicago, Denver are huge hubs for United. Are you going to have to make the case to city by city that these airports should allow these planes to take off and land from their locations?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  So this meets the same most stringent noise standards that apply to latest generation subsonic airplanes.

• 45:33Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  So long as we meet environmental noise standards and safety standards, the airplane is sort of automatically allowed everywhere. And there's no reason why it shouldn't be. It operates with existing infrastructure. The rule of thumb is if you can operate a 777, you can operate an overture from a runway perspective. So when the supersonic service comes to a local airport, the community can be really excited about the new capability, not like nervous that they're going to be disturbed. And I think that's super, super important to get right. And what that means is that there are hundreds of routes around the planet that can accept overture. And it's not going to create new noise impacts for airport communities.

• 46:14Guy Raz?

  All right. So you are now, you've just announced that you're going to build a plant in North Carolina to build the overture planes. First, you've got to test the XP1. And I know that the hope is to test it in 2023. And you've got a bunch of orders from United and American, I think, and Japan Airlines and a couple other airlines. When do you think, let's say, estimate, when will the overture aircraft start coming off the assembly line?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one thing to understand is we've learned everything we need to learn from XP1 to go make Overture a reality. And so we have to do a demonstration that airplane works, but frankly, most of the team is working on Overture now and we're full speed ahead.

• 46:59Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  So we're breaking ground on the plant to build it and we will be in production by the end of 24. We'll have the first airplane in 26 and we'll start flight testing it in 27.

• 47:12Guy Raz?

  You'll have the first Overture in 2026.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:15Guy Raz?

  That's the plan.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  That's right. And our goal is to spend two years in that flight test campaign and then be certified to carry passengers by the end of 2029.

• 47:24Guy Raz?

  Got it. This is a really challenging, hard project that you've taken on. You started this essentially in 2014 and hopefully by 2029, these planes will be available for people to travel on. I mean, it's of course, in the history of aviation, this is not a long time period, but it's long. It's not like your other startups that you build an app and six months later, it's out in the world. I mean, this is a long, hard slog.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  You know, it is a long process. It's challenging in a whole bunch of different ways. Success is not guaranteed by any stretch, but I don't experience that as a slog personally because I deeply believe that restarting innovation in flight and in particular, making the planet more accessible is an incredibly important thing to do. Along the way, I get to work with the best team I've ever worked with before and I get to come to work in a supersonic jet factory.

• 48:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Like, it's just cool and fun along the way. And, you know, I can look forward and say like, you know, man, there's a lot of capital we need. There's a lot of technical and engineering work that has to happen. We have to make sure that we're, we build this in a way that's incredibly safe for the flying public. And so there's, you know, there's a lot of challenge that's still ahead of us. But I kind of look in the mirror, the rearview mirror and say, you know what, we've already built history's first independently developed supersonic jet. We've already gotten major airlines to place orders and make non-refundable deposits. There's a lot that we've already done that people said that we could never do.

• 49:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And so we just need to keep doing things that people said we could never do.

• 49:12Guy Raz?

  Amazing. Blake Scholl, thanks so much.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Thank you, Guy. Really appreciate the conversation.

• 49:17Guy Raz?

  That's Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at HowIBuiltThis and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was James Willetts. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard,

• 50:01Guy Raz?

  Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, and Elaine Coats. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.