HIBT Lab! Boom Supersonic: Blake Scholl

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 Concor 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 Concor just didn't make economic sense. Now, it's been 20 years since the last commercial supersonic flight happened in 2003. But today's guest, Blake Shoal,

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 fly 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 engine.

At Amazon. I remember my first meeting with Bezos was when I was I think I was twenty two. Wow. And it was um My my boss's boss had told me, Hey, J Jeff has strong opinions about this project you're about to start. And you should go meet him and listen to him.

and earnest trust so he doesn't micromanage your stuff. And so I was I was twenty two, I was nervous as all get out. This was right when the Segway had come out, if we can remember that. Yeah. 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. Wow. And Jeff walks in and he's like, Hey guys, wanna ride my Segway? And we spent the first time Thirty minutes of that meeting.

Um just going up and down the halls of Amazon headquarters on Jeff's Segway. Yeah. Sounds fun. Oh, it was a total blast. I can't imagine a better icebreaker uh that got me to calm down and be able to really engage with him. So you end up um working at Amazon for five years. Um and and left in two thousand six to go to uh a a startup called Peligo, which I guess was like a

kinda early social media mobile app. It was think of it as Yelp plus Google Maps. Plus four square. Wow. On a Motorola Razor. In two thousand six.

I'm I'm already overwhelmed. Too much information. I I don't think I could handle all that. That was exactly the story of the failure of that product. You you nailed it. I think one of the mistakes we made at at Pelligo 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. Right. Um, yeah, I I had uh I had a razor myself. I kinda miss it now'cause I I look at my smartphone too much. I wish I had the razor, just answer calls and send texts. It's a simpler time.

Simple times. All right, from from what I understand, this is around the time while you were there at this company, Pelligo, that you kind of really Got interested in the Flying. Well, I started flying for fun a a few years earlier when I was in college. Uh I remember in high school

a classmate was getting flying lessons and I remember being really jealous. And I was like, Man, I wanna 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 ten 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 Pelligo. And started, you know, to finish my pilot's license.

And um kind of just y got more interested in how airplanes work and that that was about the time period where I I set a lifetime goal of flying supersonic. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so you're you know, got your pilot's license and and you're working at at this start up, which you eventually leave and you start up your own startup called Chema Labs, which

was I guess it w was an app with like a barcode and mobile payment services. What tell me about chems to be honest about it was not a not really a success. We started with what I thought I was good at rather than what I thought should exist in the world. Uh and so like, hey, I know e commerce from Amazon. Yeah. And I know mobile social from my time at Pelligo. So what should I do? I should do mobile e commerce, because like surely that's gonna be a thing. Yeah. But I've come to believe that's actually a backwards way to think about it. Because uh skills and knowledge Are highly variable. Like

You can learn new things. But passion is a lot less variable. And so I I went where I thought I knew 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 um kind of a barcode scanning game. Uh, 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. Right.

Well, you you did end up selling the company. It was acquired by Groupon, uh you know, obviously a famous sort of I don't know if cautionary tales. Totally fair, but I mean it was a Massive

Unicorn it went public. It was valued like thirty billion at one point and then you know, just just declined in in in its value quickly as people realize you could replicate the model. I think w at one point like Google maybe had offered to buy Groupon. Which they did not um accept. So you were there you were there when all this is happening, when it was like Kind of.

And And a little bit of free fall, I think. In a way, I mean my synthesis of Groupon is it's a story of massively lost potential. Um in in my view, that company had all the potential to be worth thirty or hundred billion dollars and really to have earned it. Uh 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 free fall, but for just dumb reasons, like the right data wasn't in the accounting system.

And so it was you know, it was just really stumbling over their own internal ability. And then this is 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. Uh the the visionary CEO got fired. Yeah. That's Andrew Mason, right? That's Andrew Andrew Mason, yeah. And what what Groupon I think could have been, 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 the digital coupon thing figured out how to bootstrap it. They 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 this 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 making your drinks and the kitchen starts firing the calamari, you show up at the lands on the table as you sit down. And then you know when you uh when you're done with your meal you get up and leave and it just build your group on account.

Um, and and that's an experience that like still doesn't exist. Yeah. And 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. Yeah. And then and then Andrew got fired. And and the focus really shifted on well, we just gotta focus on the next quarter. Yeah. 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.

Yeah. I I notice on your LinkedIn page it says two two thousand twelve, two thousand fourteen works at Groupon and you write um Right under it. There's nothing like working on internet coupons to make you yearn to build something you truly love. Um which which you know is a bit of a chuckle. And and Groupon, obviously a a a smart company and a and and offered an interesting product, but that wasn't really where your heart was. And and I wonder when you you know when when you're 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? Yes and no. I I had this thing on my to do list that had been on there for years called Figure How to Start an Aviation Company. Huh. And uh and I ordered some books to read, um, 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 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 with flight. Uh'cause I was so passionate about it. And I I also knew that there was just So much that was broken.

Uh in air travel. Like I would you know, 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 and Johnny Ive had designed it? Yeah. Um it would be awesome. It'd be totally awesome, but just even asking that question. uh m 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.

Yeah. I mean air travel is a miracle. You know, you're up in in a metal Tube. flying across the country or the world. And it is incredible. But that technology, I mean j uh jet travel hasn't changed, right? It hasn't changed in fifty 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 a plane and then it Takes off and you land and it's

That's it. 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 you know 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 know we as humanity have created.

And that singular vantage point provided by the airplane is this amazing a very visceral manifestation of what humanity has accomplished. And 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 it it

In my mind, it represents both the pinnacle of human achievement, but also this very weird thing where we've stopped and gone backwards. Yeah. I mean if you think about innovation, you know, we've had uh both Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, and and David Neeleman of Jet Blue on on the show in the past. And they were both true innovators, right? I mean not necessarily around aircraft technology, but

but around how to make air travel cheaper and and more accessible and more efficient I mean th the main thing that has that's changed in the last fifty years is that more people can fly because it's cheaper, right? You can pack more people in and it's It's more efficient. Certainly not a pleasant experience. to fly on a commercial airplane today.

No, we've turned something that that in my view, people should be incredibly inspired by and look forward to into an experience that that most of us dread. And, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. It's solvable. But you were talking about how, you know, Herb and Dave Neilman and there have been others who have who have been great innovators in making travel more accessible, more affordable. Um, 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 nineteen sixties, where there were entrepreneurs focused on the airplanes themselves. And then in the nineteen sixties, basically all the entrepreneurs in the aircraft companies retired.

And if we look at that entire now more than hundred year history of aviation, I think it shows a really interesting pattern that I I bet we could find in other industries as well, which is Founder led companies tend to push what the product can do. Yeah. And and then when the founders retire, what happens in those companies? Well they they promote the most successful executive. Right. Uh that reported to them who by definition is really different than the founder, because they had to compliment the founder. Yeah. 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 uh you know, Google a picture of Boeing's first airliner, the 707, and put that right next to a picture of the 7007. And if you're not an airplane nerd, it's actually kinda hard to spot the differences. Yeah. 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. We're gonna 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. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm talking with Blake Shoal, CEO and founder of Boom Supersonic. Alright, 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, though, I think the last opportunity to fly faster than the speed of sound would have been on the Concorde, which was uh like put out of service in in in two thousand three. How did you come to the decision

To start such an ambitious project like Like this. in a sort of roundabout way, I I started out thinking I would convince myself to not start it. Um, I wanted to work on a a new startup. Um, I realized that No matter what startup I f founded

uh 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 suersonic 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, you know, less pie in the sky. Uh, but instead what I found was a bunch of stale conventional wisdom. You know, there were zillions of, you know, 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. Yeah. And if you can't fly supersonic over land, the market's not big enough. Right. And Uh people won't pay for speed. And and but you know, hang on, those are those are all qualitative statements about quantitative phenomenon. You know, like okay, people clearly do pay for speed. It's why direct flights are preferred over connecting flights. Yeah. Um, and you know, okay, speed is gonna come with some kind of a, you know, 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's some constraints on where you can fly supersonic. Uh, with those constraints, how big is the market? And so I started building models. of what you know the airplane ought to be capable of. Yeah. And you know, downloaded a whole bunch of like global air travel data and sort of crunching it to say, okay, well, how much of this could benefit from supersonic? And by the middle of twenty fourteen, I had two things that were just like

really shocking. One was um sort of a 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 fairs. 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 point. Wow. And so at 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. Yeah. Like 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 gonna do this, you should really try harder because a bunch of your assumptions are conservative. Wow. 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 the just the ego in in that statement is insane. Um 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 gonna give everything I've got and find out what I'm capable of.

Wow. So basically this technology, right, the Concorde that was Kind of. put out to pasture in two thousand three. 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 and it just didn't make sense. But when you start a crunch of numbers, particularly transatlantic business class flights You saw that Essentially you could make a much more efficient plane in two thousand fourteen than you could in two thousand three. 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. Preferable.

I mean, that's right, but in a way it was easier than that'cause it wasn't twenty fourteen versus two thousand three. It was twenty fourteen versus nineteen sixty two. Right. So I mean imagine if we'd stopped innovating in computers. At the time of the Univac Yeah. And uh all we did is make them more efficient, but they were still kind of mainframes. Yeah. And then someone pops up and says, Could we have an iPhone? You know, it like

Uh but yet 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. Yeah. Alright, so you are you are not a mechanical engineer, you're obviously a smart guy and you're an engineer, but you know, like uh RJ Scaringe, founder of 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 a a car company, but so there are obviously examples of this.

But I have to imagine that you one of the first things you have to do Is find somebody To work with you is that What you did? That was really the second thing, not the first thing. Th the the first thing was really to just get educated myself. Yeah.

Uh, and I remember doing this exercise where I said, Okay, Blake, just imagine the year is twenty fifty. And you're sitting on the beach sipping Mai Ties, reading about how the world made the leap to supersonic. I mean 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 eighty five percent of the speed of sound and nobody ever broke through. Okay, so someone's gonna break through. What does that story look like? You know, is it After, you know, a century of not doing it, uh 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. Uh,'cause this is this is hard to do and it's gonna need the very best people. So a ability to attract and retain great people is gonna be fundamental to the success. And you know and it's gonna require a leader that deeply understands all the key pieces of the business, including the technology down to the physics. Right. And so I I I look in the mirror and I'm like, I you know, I am currently not any of those things. So you had to become that. 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 um recruiting My favorite interview question was teach me something. Mm. 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 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. Yeah. All right, let's just talk about How you actually

build an airplane. I mean where do you go. I mean th th 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 c cosmetics plant and going, Hey, build me this here's the twenty ingredients that I want in there and and just come back to me in a month. Like Where do you start?

Well, we started off with what the design was, and 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 it 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 as 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so for that reason, airplane design tends to be highly iterative. And historically, when design is very manual, the 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 we started building hardware. And that was really about getting calibration data.

for all the digital stuff. So we 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, rang of temperatures. We started doing wind tunnel testing, and that all of that sort of data out of the world of atoms fed back into the world of bits so that our digital design tools could just get better and better and better and that we could iterate much faster than we could kind of, you know, just building airplanes and throwing them away. Um, let's talk about actually ca I'cause you have a prototype and I think in October of twenty twenty you unveiled your first

fully assembled prototype, the X P one. It's a smaller version of what you will But I mean how it is 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

W who builds a supersonic aircraft prototype? So we put it all together ourselves. Uh one of the things that makes this business Possible. is that the 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 governed and military. So we were we were first to say, hey, we're gonna go do this. And we designed the whole airplane And then to get it built, we teamed with suppliers uh to build components. And then we brought it all to our facility in Denver where we put it together.

And so we have this, you know, roughly fifty thousand square foot. building that's gonna part office, part hangar. It was a supersonic chat factory, that's where we built the XP One where we put it together ourselves. Well. We're gonna take another quick break, but we'll hear more from Blake Shoal, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, in just a moment I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this lab.

Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest is Blake Scholl, whose company Boom Supersonic is looking to build a new generation of supersonic airplanes for commercial travel. Alright, let's talk about uh this prototype because I know that you wanted to begin test flights in twenty twenty one But it hasn't happened yet. This this has not been through a test flight. What are the obstacles and hurdles that have prevented that prototype from flying? So where we are today is just a few months away from from flying this bird. Uh we finished late last year our final Denver based taxi test and uh we've got a couple of things where we we wanna add some safety margin to the airplane and then we're gonna take it down to the Mojave Desert for 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 um I I think that's a combination of a few factors. You know, one was quite honestly some naivete on my part. Like I underestimated how hard this was. And it m maybe I had to in order to decide to go do it. Um I think so. But for for but yeah, for for better or worse, I thought this was easier than it actually was. Um, and so we you know, we we said you know, we were sort of perennially optimistic about about time frame. You know, and then we've learned some things along the way. And you know, w uh one of the big thematic learnings was, you know, we chose to build a human piloted aircraft. This is not a drone.

And uh you know, we we know the test pilots who are gonna go fly it. And uh it's an extraordinarily complex machine. It's a new design airplane, the design's different from anything that's ever flown before. And uh and and so it's really important that it be right, because it's life and death serious. 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 we've tested

everything as we went along and when we found opportunities to improve the safety profile of the airplane, we've done it. You know, and then the other kind of dimension to it is like we've been learning along the way. We we, you know, if you sort of imagine, hey, it's a new company, first new commercial aircraft company a century. We're gonna build a 65 passenger supersonic airliner w that weighs several hundred thousand pounds and trust us will get it right the first time. Like I don't even believe that. Um and so the the we so we did XB one 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 the big airplane'cause 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 it and that's a good thing'cause it we've learned.

Yeah, and and the X P one, just to just to clarify, is the the prototype overture is gonna be the the commercially developed plane that you'll eventually make. And I guess the X B one is like Like a third the size of of the overture. Um I'm I'm looking at a model of the overture on your website. It's a by the way, it's a beautiful plane. Um it's got four engines, um and it's sm it's small plane, obviously. So how will overture compare to You know, to the last

commercial supersonic airplane, which You know, of course, as we've said, it was a Concord. So the size is relatively similar to Concord 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. Uh Overture puts sixty five passengers where Concor put a hundred. So on board the airplane, it's a lot more spacious, a lot more comfortable. Um we really want to build something that people are going to want to fly over and over again. Yeah. And um Concorde a lot of problems, but one of them was

It wasn't affordable to very many people. T a ticket had to be around twenty thousand dollars. And you just can't find a hundred people who want to pay twenty grand to go somewhere on very many routes. And so we said, look, we know ultimately we wanna make supersonic flight available to everybody who flies. You know, we we want flying fast to be less expensive than flying slow. That's the big driver. And then for overture one, 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 fairs uh a quarter. Of what was charged on Concorde. So it'll be about five thousand bucks. At five thousand dollars it is a very it on most routes it is very profitable for airlines. And that's basically equivalent to a business class flight from London to New York.

Something like that. Yeah, I mean the fares vary, but it it's it's pretty common for people to pay five grand or you know, sometimes more than that. for a uh a round trip ticket. across the Atlantic. So you're so f five grand for supersonic. uh most business travelers I talk to are like wow, that actually seems like a good deal.

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

So it has about forty two fifty nautical miles of range. And so what that means in practice is that just about the longest nonstop route would be Tokyo to Seattle. Mm-hmm. Uh in four and a half hours. And just pause on that for a second. Four and a half hours across the Pacific. Now it takes what Uh ten. Yeah, r roughly, you know, n nine, ten it depends which direction we're going, what the winds are, et cetera. But yeah, like roughly twice that. And

Yeah, that's fast enough that you can leave the US A whole day later. to make a a given meeting in Tokyo. It's it's just like much, much faster. Um, and w 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, which is like fifteen, sixteen hours today. Well

O overture can't do that. nonstop. It has to stop for gas. Right. But even with the pit stop. Uh it's gonna be like eight and a half hours. Right. So you're on the ground for may maybe maybe twenty five, thirty minutes, something like that. And then you're back up and away and the the refuel has the you know, it's the experiential of a little bit of turbulence in the middle of the flight because it's not interruptive to the experience. All right, and now let's talk about the environmental

side to it. You're talking about using sustainable aviation fuels. Tell me how this is going to'cause you have a plan to be carbon neutral. So how how do you make this flight substantially better than than existing commercial. Flights.

Let's start with why. And it g and it goes back to kind of what makes me get out of bed every morning. And I 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 it's gonna 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 you know, YouTube videos or whatever. So like enabling more in person interaction matters. And just so I actually believe in a future where there's a lot more travel than there is today. Um and that 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 ten 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 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? Um, you know, it's not batteries'cause batteries are just far too heavy. Yeah. So you want you want the energy density of Liquid hydrocarbons.

Um, but the the exciting thing is they don't have to be sourced out of fossil fuels out of the ground, but they're they're sort of a new generation of fuel technology. Uh that's called Power to Liquid. Uh, that is basically a carbon sequestration based technology that you can use to create uh synthetic kerosene. And th 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 fuel is it's backwards compatible. meaning it's chemically very similar to traditional fossil jet fuel. And so to today's airplanes can do fifty fifty of sustainable fuel and traditional fuel. Overture can do a hundred percent. But the 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, uh 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 fifty-fifty. And for that reason, it can get all the way to net zero. And this is this is important to us. uh it's important to our customers and when when United Airlines ordered overture

They made a public commitment to run it on a hundred percent sustainable aviation fuel on a net zero carbon basis. And uh I I find it personally just really exciting that the airplane that we all most want to fly on is also gonna be the best one for the planet. All right.

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? It's this extremely loud sound that a jet makes when it breaks a sound barrier. Um and I think it's why Concorde was limited

to flying out of just a few airports by the end of its life. Um and it and it only flew at supersonic speeds over the ocean, right? So So let's talk about the like the routes that you're hoping Overture will fly. I mean if you're going West from the US, you gotta fly out of LAX and and Seattle, you mentioned San Francisco.

Um you wanna fly out of New York. Because New York, London, New York, Paris is a profitable route. And and I know that you've partnered with United when and and obviously Chicago, Denver are huge hubs for United. Um are you gonna have to make the case to s city by city that um

You know, that these airports should allow these Take off and land from there. Yeah.

So this meets the same most stringent noise standards that apply to latest generation subsonic airplanes. Got it. So so long as we meet uh environmental noise standards and safety standards, the the airplane is sort of automatically allowed everywhere. And there's and there's no reason why it shouldn't be. It it operates with existing infrastructure, you know, the rule of thumb is if you can operate a a triple seven, you can operate an overture from a runway perspective. So so w when supersonic service comes to a local airport, the community can be really excited about the new capability, not like nervous that like, you know, they're gonna be disturbed. And I think that's I think that's super, super important to get right. And what that means is that there are hundreds of roots around the planet that can accept overture. Um, and it's you know, it's not gonna create new noise impacts for airport communities. Alright, so you are

Now you've just announced that you're gonna build a plant in North Carolina to build the overture planes. First you've got to test the XP one and I know that the hope is to test it in twenty twenty three. Um And you've got a bunch of orders from United and American, I think, and uh Japan Airlines and and a couple of other you know airlines.

When do you think Let's say Estimate. When will the overture aircraft start coming off the assembly line? Yeah, so one thing to understand is, you know, we've learned everything we need to learn from XB One to go make overture a reality. And so we we know we we have to do sort of a demonstration that airplane works, but frankly most of the team is working on overture now and we're full speed ahead. Got it. Okay. So we're we're breaking ground on the the plant to build it.

And uh we will be in production uh by the end of twenty four. We'll have the first airplane in twenty six and we'll start flight testing it in twenty seven. The first overture in two thousand twenty six. That's the that's the plan. That's right. And our our goal is to spend two years in that flight test campaign. And then uh be certified to carry passengers by the end of twenty twenty nine. Got it.

Um This is a really challenging hard project that you've taken on. You started this essentially in twenty fourteen. And hopefully by twenty twenty nine.

These planes will be available for people to to to travel on. Um I mean it's of course in the in in sort of the history of aviation, this is not a long time period, but it's long. It's not like your other startups that you know, you build an app and six months later it's out in the world. I mean this is a long

Hard slog. Yeah, it is a long process. It's challenging in a whole bunch of different ways. Success is not guaranteed. uh by any stretch. But I don't

Experience that as a slog, personally. Because I mean 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. Yeah. Like It's just cool and fun along the way. And you know, I can look forward and say like, you know, man, we're there's a lot of capital we need. There's a lot of technical and engineering work for that to happen. We have to make sure that we're we build this in a way that's incredibly safe for the flying public. Ah and so there's you know there's a lot of challenge that's still ahead of us

But I kinda look in the mirror, uh, in the the rear view 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 that we've already done that people said that we could never do. Yeah. And so we don't we just need to keep doing things that people said we could never do. Amazing. Uh Blake Shoal, thanks so much. Thank you, guy, really appreciate the conversation. That's Blake Shoal, 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 HowI Built This, and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.ros. If you want to contact the team, our email address is hibt at id.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Chris Massini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was James Willits. Our music was composed by Raptine Arablui.

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