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Blake Scholl did not intend to upend the global air travel industry when he visited the Museum of Flight in Seattle in 2007. He was there only to scratch his itch for all things avionic—one that had seen him flying for fun since he was in college just a few years earlier. The museum didn’t disappoint—it never does, not with its 1952 Douglas Skyhawk jet, its World War I-era Curtiss Jenny biplane, its 1972 replica of the Apollo 17 lunar module. And then there was the flying machine that brought Scholl up short: a British Airways supersonic Concorde, which went into commercial service in 1976 and was permanently mothballed in 2003.
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Scholl took the Concorde’s measure from needle nose to tapered tail, shook his head and thought, “This is the most amazing airliner ever made. Why is it in a museum? If there was a better thing out there flying it would make sense.” But there isn’t a better—or at least faster—thing flying. For 27 short years, the world had the capacity for commercial supersonic flight, made possible by a small Concorde fleet of 14 planes—developed under a treaty between the U.K. and France and divided evenly between Air France and British Airways. The plane flew at over twice the speed of sound and made a record trans-Atlantic crossing in two hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds. Then high cost—a cool $20,000 per seat—a cramped cabin, flagging demand, and a fatal runway accident in 2000 that claimed more than 100 lives grounded the fleet for good.
But just because supersonic passenger transport had not been done well did not mean it shouldn’t be done at all. That day in Seattle, Scholl—then 26, with no background in aeronautical engineering, a degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and a stint as an engineer at Amazon—decided that the supersonic passenger plane deserved a second chance, and that he would provide it.
Later this month, on Jan. 27, in the same Mojave desert where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, the XB-1 aircraft, a demonstrator vehicle that is the brainchild of Scholl’s 11-year old company, Boom Supersonic, is expected to become the first private flying machine built neither by a military nor a nation-state to break the sound barrier. The aircraft has already achieved Mach 0.95—or 95% of the speed of sound; if it blows past that sonic barrier as planned the flight will go a long way toward justifying the faith that three major carriers—United, American, and Japan Airlines—have already shown in placing orders or pre-orders for a small starting fleet. Scholl’s goal is not just to bring supersonic travel back to the flying public, but to do it at scale, at a cost per seat no greater than business travelers pay today—a quarter of what the old Concorde passengers had to pony up. The plane will be smaller than the average passenger jet—no more than 80 seats—but far faster, up to Mach 1.7, and, if popular enough, Scholl believes, eventually outnumber its bigger, slower, logier cousins.
“I want to get supersonic in the hands of every passenger,” Scholl says. “And when we do that, the market for supersonic is ultimately going to be bigger than the market for subsonic.”
TIME talked to Scholl on Jan. 13 about his plans for his company, the industry, and, ultimately, for untold numbers of the 4.5 billion commercial passengers who travel by air each year.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Today your work is all about aviation, but you didn’t start off anywhere near that industry. What was your early career like?
I was incredibly excited originally by computer science and rushed through college at Carnegie Mellon to get my degree done in three years just as the dot.com bubble was bursting. I took my first job at Amazon and got an offer only three weeks before a hiring freeze. I think I was roughly engineer number 200. It was really a magical time, because you didn’t have to ask permission for anything. You could just go do things, and if you didn’t screw it up too badly, you’d be able to keep doing it. I kind of stumbled on the opportunity in 2002 to do Amazon’s first ad buy from Google. I created the team that built the first system that would buy ads automatically on the internet. That ended up being a rocket ship, and it also was one that Bezos cared about. Early in one’s career there’s nothing like having the fortune of working on something that somebody significant cares about.
I spent five years at Amazon, then worked at a couple of different startups before I decided I wanted to do my own thing in mobile e-commerce so I built this barcode scanning game like Foursquare that would let you find businesses and check into stores. Literally, if you make a list of the most important things in the world to the least important, I think a barcode scanning game is pretty much right at the bottom of that stack. I didn’t think it was very interesting, [so] we sold it to Groupon. After that I decided I wanted to do another startup, that’s definitely in my DNA, but I never wanted to ask myself, Is it worth it?
And that’s when you switched to commercial aviation.
Right. The day I went to the Museum of Flight, it just rattled around in my head for a long time, and my first question was, Why did Concorde fail? The answer was it was too expensive. It was for the 1% of the 1%. So I bought every textbook I could find on aerospace engineering and I took an airplane design class in the middle of 2014. I came to the conclusion that if you size the airplane correctly, you’d only have to beat Concord by about 30% in fuel efficiency to get the cost down. And you were competing with 50 to 60-year-old technology, so that shouldn’t be impossible.
That indeed doesn’t sound too difficult. But if it in fact was so easy surely somebody would have been building supersonic planes already.
That’s what I thought. I figured if nobody’s doing supersonic there’s probably a good reason. I predicted I would get two weeks into the research and kind of get the thing out of my system. But instead, what I found is there was no good reason. In fact, the shocking thing is, all the technology already existed. If you take a Boeing 787 and you basically take the same carbon fiber composites, you shrink it down, you make it long and skinny, and you put twice as many engines on it, you can go twice as fast. You don’t need any new technology. You don’t need any new regulations. You don’t need any new supply chain. All that was missing was a team.
Then I made a spreadsheet model of the airplane and another spreadsheet model of the market. I took it all to a professor at Stanford who had done some supersonics research. I was like, dude, look at this, check my math, because I’ve been at this for like, a second, and I don’t have any background here. He looked at my work and clicked around and told me that my assumptions about the [potential for the market] were all too conservative. He said, “Blake, if you’re going to do this, you should be more ambitious.” At that point, I left his office and thought, It’s time to go find some people and see how far we can get with this.
An airplane company takes a fair bit of seed money. How did you get the resources to get started?
I put half of what I raised from the Groupon sale into the company, to the point that my family was kind of freaked out. Then we raised our first seed round in 2015. And the process was basically, you know, raise some money, accomplish some milestones. Raise some more money, accomplish some more milestones. Lather, rinse, repeat. Today there are 140 people working for us fulltime, we’ve got a headquarters in Denver and we just finished building a factory in North Carolina that’s ultimately designed to build 33 planes a year. If passengers switch to supersonic on the routes where it’s going to be a big speed up and will be profitable for airlines, that’s about 1,000 airplanes we’ll need.
You’re in this not just to bring back supersonic, but to make money. What’s your price point both for selling planes and selling tickets?
It’s profitable at $5,000 per ticket—actually very profitable at $5,000
per ticket. For the plane itself, everyone pays the same price, which is $200 million a copy. And it’ll cost us about half of that to build one. The way this whole thing works is to get everyone’s interest lined up. What do passengers want? What do airlines want? What do our investors want? It’s a good business.
How many planes do United, American, and Japan airlines currently have on order?
Those guys have a total of 132. But when you can fly United across the pond in three and a half hours and British Airways take seven, obviously, British Airways is going to want [to go supersonic] also. I don’t know a single person who wants a longer flight. So I think there is a sort of a domino effect that will play out over time. There will always be a place for bargain basement flying. You know, think Spirit Airlines. But airplanes have to get faster and cheaper just like phones, cars, and computers.
You may be able to get the price of supersonic travel down, but the physics of the sound barrier are non-negotiable. How do you deal with the problem of the sonic boom?
Just put it over ocean, where no one’s there to hear it. That’s why the initial routes are going to be not just New York to London, but Miami to Madrid, Seattle to Tokyo, Los Angeles to Sydney. There are roughly 600 routes on the planet where they’re mostly over water. When we’re over land we’ll fly right under the speed of sound, so we don’t make a sonic boom, and we’re still 20% faster.
Is any of your technology transferable to the military? It would seem that the government would be an attractive customer.
Yeah, we’re doing a bit of work with the Air Force, but we deliberately don’t have any military technology on the airplane, because we want this to be something we can export everywhere. Still there’s some defense uses. The most important is just VIP transport. If the Secretary of State needs to get to London or Paris to influence the situation in Ukraine, how quickly can that happen? When there’s a crisis, can the most important people in the world show up in person? That ability to project soft power is a big deal. And then there’s other cases that are interesting. Can we get a special forces team anywhere on the planet to respond to a crisis quickly? If we can get things to and from Taiwan in the time that it would have taken us to get something to or from Europe, that’s actually a meaningful advantage. If you look at what the military has today, we’ve got fast fighters, we’ve got fast bombers, but if you want to move people or things, we have 50-year-old airplanes.
The passenger model of your plane will be named Overture, which has a certain grandness to it. Will it live up to the name?
The Concorde was uncomfortable and flew half empty. Overture will be different. In the front of the plane, we’ll have one row of seats next to one row of windows, an aisle, a middle row of two abreast seats, another aisle next to that, and another row of seats next to the other windows, so everyone has aisle access. In the back, where the plane is narrower, it will be just two single rows of seats along each row of windows, so you don’t have to choose between an aisle and a window; you get both. I like to think, What would an airplane be like if Apple designed it—somebody who really cared?
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