Written by Nick Harrell, Edited by Jason Carman

Fortune favors the bold. That’s a phrase so heavily embedded in the social lexicon that it occasionally loses its meaning, but there’s usually a reason we repeat things. If it’s made its way into the territory of often said and often heard, there’s probably some truth to it.

Blake Scholl’s parents told him that he fell in love with airplanes when he was 6th months old. As a kid, he grew up going to the local airport to watch Cessna’s take off and land, but as he told us in this week's episode, he never envisioned a career in aerospace. In 2001, Scholl was a young software engineer at an even younger Amazon. His career grew exponentially from his success in that role, and by 2014 he was ready to take on a brand new challenge: Aviation. Not just regular aviation either, the Cincinnati native had his heart set on making commercial supersonic flight accessible. Mind you, in spite of his bevy of business-related accomplishments, Scholl had no experience in the field of aviation. No degree in aerodynamics or engineering, no real connections within the field. 

As you can imagine, there was plenty of skepticism, fairly placed skepticism at that. An outsider of aviation was taking on one of the largest modern challenges in the field. But what makes supersonic flight so simultaneously vexing and alluring? To answer that question we have to delve into the history of Boom’s spiritual predecessor, the Concorde.

The Complicated History of The Concorde

A joint venture by the French and British governments, the Concorde was designed to cut flight times in half. A trip from New York to London would take only 3 hours, and the ripple effects that seemed plausible from this kind of evolution in travel were incredible. It was faster than anything we had seen before and had the potential to revolutionize international travel. 

But of course, there’s a reason the Concorde doesn’t fly anymore, multiple in fact. The first had to do with heat. While traveling at Mach 2 speeds is an immense part of what motivated the venture in the first place, it greatly complicates the aerodynamics of the plane. Moving at around 1,354 mph or 2,180 km/h greatly increases the friction between the air and the aircraft, which in the case of the Concorde, resulted in the plane's surface reaching 127 degrees Celsius, or 260 degrees Fahrenheit. These extreme temperatures caused a multitude of hurdles that demanded increasingly complex solutions. The entirety of the fuselage had to be coated in a highly reflective white paint. The plane's windows and rivets had to be specially designed to deal with the increased thermal expansion. 

Next up there was the issue of fuel consumption. The Concorde used the Rolls Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engines, which were afterburning turbojet engines. While it was a technological marvel for its time, the Olympus 593 was significantly less fuel-efficient than its turbofan counterparts. Not only did this increase fuel prices, it also limited the range of the aircraft. Though it could fly transatlantic routes, its range was much shorter than modern long-haul planes. Add in the fact that simulation/software technology was a far cry from what it is today, it becomes apparent that solving these issues boiled down to a grueling and expensive process of trial and error through prototyping. 

This combination of inefficient fuel consumption and the need for high-level customization skyrocketed operating costs. As a result, flying on a Concorde plane was an incredibly expensive luxury reserved for only the wealthiest of people.

Finally, there was the sound. The sonic boom generated by the supersonic speed led to bans on any overland flights for the Concorde, limiting it to strictly transatlantic routes.

Add all of those complications together, and it’s easy to see how the devastating crash of Air France flight 4590 sunk the Concorde entirely. On July 25th, 2000, a Concorde plane ran over a piece of debris on the runway, resulting in a ruptured tire. It would crash on the runway killing 113 people, including everyone that was on board. Less than a month later the CAA and the DGAC withdrew the Certificate of Airworthiness for the Concorde, and although they would eventually earn it back, the damage had been done. The Concorde’s safety reputation had been irreparably damaged, and on November 26th, 2003, the plane would make its last commercial flight.

In summation, as exciting and top-of-the-line as the Concorde was, it was equally as convoluted and fiscally murky. But no one knows that better than Blake Scholl and Boom Supersonic, which is why they aren’t building another Concorde, they’re building the Boom Overture.

Boom Overture

The Boom Overture, which is planned to hit the skies commercially in 2029, is the proposed supersonic airplane that will bring supersonic travel back to the masses. But it isn’t an unrealistic dream from some wide-eyed aviation enthusiasts. Boom Supersonic has crafted meticulous plans, many of which involve some relative sacrifices. The first of which is ironically enough, speed. Overture will fly at Mach 1.7, still significantly faster than today's jets, but slower than the Mach 2.04 that the Concorde flew at. This is a calculated step back, as flying at this slightly slower speed should allow Overture to avoid many of the heat pitfalls that plagued the Concorde. Additionally, Overture plans to scale back the passenger capacity. Many believed that the 100 passengers per flight was a limiting factor of the Concorde and Blake Scholl agrees, just in a different way. Scholl and Boom Supersonic believe that transporting 100 passengers per flight was too many and believe that reducing the number of passengers will not only increase the fiscal feasibility of the venture but the aircraft’s performance as well.

Boom’s Overture has an answer for just about every flaw in the design of the Concorde, but it all hinges on the engine. Boom Supersonic is partnering with NASA in efforts to turn the sonic boom that hindered the Concorde, into a sonic “thump”. Their plans for the Symphony engine, which will be designed by Boom themselves after Rolls Royce pulled out of the project, revolve around a medium bypass Turbofan design optimized for Supersonic flight. In the words of Blake Scholl himself “it’s a massive leap forward versus the afterburning turbojets that we had for Concorde in the 1960s. These are cleaner, quieter, and dramatically more fuel efficient.” 

There’s no way around the fact that developing a new engine for their planes is a massive undertaking, both from a design perspective and a logistical point of view, but that’s not the only area in which Boom is innovating. A flight that takes full advantage of modern technology makes flying these planes theoretically significantly easier than flying a Concorde, which needed a flight engineer present in the cockpit for every single flight. Even landing the aircraft is sizably simpler and safer than landing its spiritual predecessor. While the Concorde relied on a complex cockpit movement mechanism that allowed the cockpit to point down during the landing, the Overture simply placed a camera on the nose of the plane. Thanks to the augmented flight deck, the camera feeds into a viewport giving the pilot a full view of the landing space. Finally, there’s the issue of environmental concerns, however, Boom states that their planes will run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel, which would outclass today’s jets that run on a 50/50 blend of sustainable aviation fuel and fossil fuels. We asked Blake if this level of eco-friendly commitment made the endeavor economically difficult. He told us no, but added that sustainable aviation fuel was an area with immense potential for innovation, and Boom would have interest in partnering with anyone that could show a more viable way to produce sustainable aviation fuel.

The Future of Boom

Of course, all of this sounds great on paper, but seeing it come to fruition is an arduous process made up of incremental gains. Boom Supersonic was gracious enough to allow us to watch and film their latest test flight, and we highly advise you check it out in this week's episode.

We left El Segundo at 4 AM to arrive at the complex in the Mojave desert at 6 AM with little idea of what to expect, but what we witnessed was inarguably inspiring. The XB-1, Boom’s preliminary prototype, was taking its 3rd test flight. Intending to establish proof of concept, the XB-1 would be flying for around 30 minutes, as Boom continues to incrementally push the project along. It was a prototype representing the future of aviation taxiing people around an area littered with the very planes it aims to surpass, followed by a test flight that went off without a hitch. Boom is still a ways away from the dream of Overture being realized, but they have steadily moved along, undeterred by the doubt thus far.

The reality is, as impressive as the strides Blake Scholl and Boom Supersonic have made are, there is still a long way to go before we see another supersonic commercial flight, but we can acknowledge the distance that remains and the distance they’ve already covered. Boom Supersonic has already secured deals with American Airlines, United, and Japan Airlines. They completed construction on their Superfactory site in North Carolina earlier this year, and continue to steadily make progress.

We're not here to make definitive declarations one way or the other, but if fortune truly favors the bold, then Boom Supersonic is in great hands. We for one can not wait to see how the future unfolds for them.

The aviation renaissance is only beginning, and we’ll be there to tell the story the whole way through.

Thanks for reading and watching,

Keep on building the future.