Is supersonic travel about to take off? TLFL speaks to Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom

I never got further than being towed around Heathrow on Concorde, and I still regret to this day that I never got to fly supersonic, particularly as my late father had been involved in the design of some parts for Concorde, which measured pressure. I could never understand how we seem to have gone backwards with air travel since then, and apparently, I was not alone. I must admit I have been a little skeptical that Boom would ever get off the ground (pun intended). However, having seen their recent successful supersonic test flights and now speaking to their CEO Blake, it seems like supersonic travel may be just around the corner.

Here is what Blake had to say:

Michele

What made you come up with the idea to launch Boom?

Blake

Well, I never got to fly on Concorde. I was lucky to grow up in a world where innovation was normal. My first job out of school was at Amazon in the early 2000s when the Internet and computers were where innovation was happening. In my mid-20s, I saw one of the Concordes in the Seattle Museum of Flight and set a lifetime goal of flying supersonically. I got my private pilot’s license at college, so I always had an interest in aviation. 

I put a Google alert on supersonic jet because I wanted to be first to know so I could buy a ticket. However, it was just 10 years of nothing, and I couldn’t believe that the world had actually gone backwards and that we’d made air travel miserable and slower. I thought there would probably be a good reason nobody was doing it. It was a bad idea or impossible and instead, what I found was a bunch of stale conventional wisdom.  I thought that if we just took modern aeroplane technology, we could pick up where Concorde had left off and build the first really mainstream supersonic airliner, and we didn’t have to invent anything to make that work. We just needed to have the courage to put a team together and do it. 

Michele

I think at that time, you had sold a small e-commerce company to Groupon and had been working for them after various e-commerce companies. How did you go from that role to starting Boom? 

Blake

I was not wealthy, but I had sold a small company to Groupon, and I had some savings. I basically spent about a year just getting educated. I think people underestimate how much they can learn when they’re motivated and driven, and my decision to do Boom was very much I wanted to prioritise what I wanted to create. So that first year, I bought every textbook I could find. I took remedial calculus and physics classes because I hadn’t had calculus or physics since high school. I took an aeroplane design class. I started building a spreadsheet model of the aeroplane and a spreadsheet model of the market. 

I reasoned that if you took what’s now 20-year-old 787 technology and you applied it to supersonic, you could have a massive breakthrough. That would mean taking a carbon composite airframe, shrinking it down, making it long and skinny, and putting in twice as many engines. This would make it go twice as fast. Since materials, engines, aerodynamics and avionics, have all advanced from the 1960s, we could now reduce the cost of flying supersonic, which was the major problem with Concorde, by about 3/4.

Boom could be more like flying business class versus this premium first-class product. That’s really exciting because it means way more people can benefit, as Concord was more for rock stars and royalty.

Michele

You’re saying you see it as being business class, do you see it as being business class only? How do you envisage the interior being designed? 

Blake

Concord was famously not very comfortable and kind of cramped. We have a couple of Concord seats in our office here, and if you didn’t know better, they could be mistaken for Ryanair. And and so I think speed is not enough. It needs to be a wonderful passenger experience as well and we care a lot about that. Unlike Boeing or Airbus, which just outsource that to airlines, we do it ourselves and we have a really talented team that works on it. 

We haven’t revealed the final design yet, but it’s really nice though the one thing it doesn’t have is a flat bed. In today’s business class, people are paying top dollar for a flying bed because they hate that the flights are long and they want to sleep through them. However, there’s no such thing as a good bed on an aeroplane, beds at home are better. We can sleep way better on the ground than we can on any aeroplane. So, if you make the flight faster then you don’t need to sleep on it and you can have a much better night’s rest before you leave or after you arrive.

Michele

What sort of price point do you think it would be?

Blake

It will be up to the airlines, but we are designing for the lowest possible operating cost because we want the most people to benefit from this. For London to New York, round trip, the break-even fare is about $3500 which means around a $5000 ticket. That’s a price point that people already pay routinely in business class today. That’s Overture 1, our first model. There will be an Overture 2 and an Overture 3 and we want to get the price down to the point where ultimately there’s a supersonic jet for anybody who wants it.

Michele

So your demonstrator aircraft XB-1 recently went supersonic twice, which must be really gratifying to get to this stage. Was there a stage before that earlier on where you thought, you know what, this is actually going to happen?

Blake

There have been a lot of little breakthroughs. There’s been a lot of frankly near-death experiences too for the project!. Every year, it seems like we have one thing that feels like it might kill us, and then we always find a way to survive. But breaking the sound barrier for the first time, which is huge and we knew  would happen because we’d put all the effort in and we’d tested very carefully up to that point. Nonetheless that moment where I was watching the live stream and we watched the Mach number tick over to more than one was one of the greatest moments in my life! Across 2 supersonic test flights, we’ve now broken the sound barrier 6 times, and the most exciting thing is we’ve done it 6 times and we’ve made zero audible Sonic booms, so not only going supersonic, but we’ve demonstrated a practical way to address the questions about Sonic Boom.

Michele

 I hadn’t really heard much Boom being Boomless until now which is really interesting.Does that mean that it opens up a lot of routes that probably wouldn’t have been available to Concorde because of noise concerns?

Blake

Boomless cruise works at speeds up to Mach 1.3, and the full speed of the aeroplane is Mach 1.7. So we can get about a 50% speed-up boomless over conventional aircraft. So we’ll do that over land and then over water just like Concord we will open up the throttles and we’ll go fully to 1.7 Mach. Across the continental US, there previously wouldn’t have been a big speed-up. Now we could we can shave 90 minutes off. So, imagine leaving New York at 8:00 AM and then being in Los Angeles, at 8:30 AM, with the time difference. And flying across Europe, such as from London to Dubai, that previously would have gotten small speed-ups, now it can get much bigger speed-ups.

Michele

What’s the longest route you think it’s likely to serve, and what sort of routes do you think it will be used on?

Blake

There are hundreds of routes where it makes sense, and fares already in the market will support profitable operations.  The obvious ones are all the North Atlantic, not just New York to London but Boston to Paris and Washington DC to Madrid and Miami to Frankfurt. Also, transcontinental North American routes such as New York to LA, Seattle to Vancouver. About the longest we can do non-stop is Tokyo to Seattle in Version 1, and obviously, there’ll be future generation aeroplanes that can fly longer, non-stop. If you’re willing to refuel, like a Formula One, pit-stop style, you can do Sydney to LA in 8 1/2 hours, including the refuel, versus today, which takes 14 or 15 hours. 

Michele

What is the point at which you think, assuming everything goes correctly, you will have fare-paying passengers sitting on the aircraft with the airlines?

Blake

In about 4 1/2 years, so our goal is by the end of 2029.

Michele

So you’re using a prototype at the moment to prove the concept. When will we see Overture, the passenger aircraft, start air testing?

Blake

We actually froze the design on the airliner last week, and we’ll start building the first one in about 18 months. So, two or three years we will have the first one off the line, and it’s our goal to put it in the air in 2028 and have it ready for passengers in 2029.

Michele

One interesting thing is obviously seeing some of the announcements about potential orders. I don’t think I’ve seen anything about British Airways or Air France who are obviously the original operators of Concorde. 

Blake

Passengers will switch airlines to get their supersonic flight, so if BA doesn’t have supersonic and United and American do, it’s a really great day for for United and American. And it’s a pretty terrible day for BA. So I think everyone’s going to end up with supersonic jets because their customers are going to demand it. Overture’s order book stands at 130 aircraft, including orders and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines, and Japan Airlines.

Michele

There’s a lot of disbelief and sometimes a bit of negativity about Boom. Everyone loves the concept of it, but a lot of people say, well, it’s all great but if someone could do it, they would have done it by now because it’s been over 20 years since Concorde flow. What do you say to the people that say, “oh, it’s great, but it’ll never fly.”

Blake

Hold my beer! What we’re doing is really hard, and there is absolutely no guarantee of success. Some people could stand around and they could point out all the problems that we have to overcome. What I get excited about is people who say we’re going to solve all those problems. We’re going to make it work. There will always be sceptics. That’s OK. One day, they’ll all get on the aeroplane. And they’ll enjoy it!

Michele

Being a former air traffic controller, can you tell us anything about the flight profile? Is it similar to Concorde where you could see the curvature of the earth?

The aeroplane flies higher above the lower speed aircraft, and that’s one of the things that should make it easier from an ATC perspective. It will cruise climb to FL600 like Concorde (normal aircraft fly around FL320-400)

Blake

There’s one thing we have that’s different is that Concorde didn’t have any kind of Sonic boom prediction capability, so they couldn’t accelerate until very far off the coast. Overture has real-time Sonic boom production, which means that the airplane will tell the pilots the moment they can safely press the throttles forward. Some of those optimizations will actually mean that we can save time that Concorde couldn’t save because we can confidently accelerate earlier.