Breaking the Sound Barrier with Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic | E2186

What It Covers

Blake Scholl from Boom Supersonic discusses breaking the sound barrier with their XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, developing the Symphony engine in-house, solving sonic boom through software algorithms, and targeting 2029-2030 for commercial supersonic passenger flights at business class prices.

Key Questions Answered

• •Boomless Flight Technology: Boom solves sonic boom using ray tracing algorithms from computer graphics to calculate flight trajectories based on atmospheric temperature gradients. Flying at sufficient altitude with speed-controlled boom angles allows sound waves to refract upward, never reaching ground. Maximum quiet speeds range from Mach 1.05 to 1.3 depending on weather conditions, enabling 50% faster travel than current jets without ground noise.
• •In-House Engine Development: Boom builds Symphony engines internally using vertical integration and three-d printing to achieve 10x cost reduction and 50% time savings compared to traditional aerospace. The slacker index metric measures productivity as wait time divided by build time. Buying a million-dollar machine enables 24-hour turbine blade printing versus six-month traditional procurement at similar cost.
• •Product Market Fit Validation: Boom secured firm orders with deposits from United, American, and Japan Airlines totaling five and a half years of production capacity before building the commercial aircraft. This demonstrates specific demand for their exact specifications: 4,000 nautical mile range, 62 seats, business class economics at $5,000 round trip transatlantic versus Concorde's $20,000 tickets with inferior comfort.
• •Hardware Iteration Speed: Boom embeds software engineers with hardware teams to automate design changes through their Make Boom platform. Updating one airplane component triggers automatic redesign of dependent systems via push-button automation. This agile hardware development approach mirrors software sprints, reducing iteration costs and enabling faster product development cycles than traditional aerospace twenty-one year product stagnation.
• •Starlink Revenue Strategy: Boom developed an undisclosed hardware product launching before the supersonic airliner with over one billion dollars in orders. This Starlink-equivalent strategy provides earlier revenue to finance the longer development timeline of Overture, similar to how SpaceX funded Falcon 9 development through satellite internet services. The product ships from their Denver factory using the same core supersonic technology.