Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic
On Tuesday, May 25th, I had the honor to interview Blake Scholl. Mr. Scholl is the Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. The commercial airliner that Boom is developing, called Overture, will be capable of flying two times faster than any airliner today and has already received 35 orders from United Airlines and American Airlines. Prior to that, he worked at Pelago and Amazon and co-founded mobile tech startup Kima Labs which was acquired by Groupon in 2012. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joshua Kupietzky: What is your background in the aviation industry?
Blake Scholl: I am a software engineer by training, and I started my career at Amazon. When I was in high school, I remember being jealous of my friends who got to take flying lessons. In college, I started taking flying lessons, and in my mid-twenties, I got my Private Pilot's License and then my instrument rating in 2011. I have always been passionate about flying, but I was not in the industry for the first fifteen years of my career. When I started Boom, I only knew how to fly a small single-engine airplane and had only read one book on aerodynamics.
JK: It is somewhat uncommon for aviation CEOs to come from outside the aviation industry. From college you went to Amazon and then founded a company that was bought by Groupon. What drove you to start Boom?
BS: Looking at where entrepreneurial activity has been in the economy for the last thirty to forty years, it has very much been in the “high-tech world.” That is where new companies have been created and where entrepreneurial activity has been concentrated. The last new commercial aircraft company was founded in 1921 by Donald Douglas. It has been more than a century. In fact, the rise of the jet age in the 1960s corresponds with the paramount of the last founders in commercial aircraft manufacturing. Since then, the industry has had the leaders of big aerospace companies transition from founders/entrepreneurs to more financially driven people. In other terms, optimization rather than invention process. Airplanes have become dramatically more efficient, but we have not made them better at connecting people across great distances. For example, we have not made airplanes faster.
On the space side of aerospace, there is a similar pattern. In 1969, we landed on the moon for the first time and flew the Concorde for the first time. Decades later, we can not go to the moon, and we can not fly supersonic. We have actually gone backward in our technical capability. Now looking at where we are finally moving forward on the space side, it is not from people in the aerospace industry. These people grew up in the tech world where innovation and invention were the norm and jumped industries such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Both were very inspiring to me. There is a strong parallel for Boom and me. I grew up in a tech world where innovation was the norm, and I loved airplanes. I learned to fly on a Cessna 172, which is basically the same airplane from the 1940s and 1950s. This led me to find a way to restart innovation, and I had this through a deep conviction from the tech world that things could be made better, but somehow, we got stuck, and I wanted to get us unstuck.
JK: The development of supersonic aircraft are driven predominately by startups. Why haven’t established manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus entered into the supersonic market and instead acted cautiously in the area?
BS: It comes down to two things: lack of entrepreneurs and innovators dilemma. One is the lack of entrepreneurship because founders push things forward, and we haven't had founders. The other is what's often called an innovator's dilemma. For example, Boeing does one new aircraft program every ten or fifteen years that has relatively low-margin products. Boeing may earn 8% or 10% profit on the 787 Dreamliner, yet developing one costs billions of dollars. This leads them to end up in a world where they invest in an enormous amount of development, forcing them to keep manufacturing the product for decades to earn back their investment. In that world, there is a financial incentive not to introduce a new product that would undermine sales of products while still earning back their investment. A company does not want to cannibalize its existing sales. That creates an incentive where the company will only create new products that are complementary to existing products, not competitive ones.
If Boeing went and did what Boom is doing, which is building an all-business class supersonic airliner, it would pull the most profitable passengers out of a Boeing 787 or Boeing 777 and undermine the earn back on those cash cow programs. It is the same story strategically at Airbus. Boeing and Airbus can certainly do what we are doing technologically. We think we can do it faster and better as a start-up. They could do it if they wanted to, but they don't want to because they don't want to undermine the cash cow. This creates a duopoly situation where only two airframers are producing long-haul aircraft, and neither of them has an incentive to build a supersonic airliner. It ends with a kind of iterative such as Boeing copies Airbus and Airbus copies Boeing, and they kind of inch their way optimizing, but no one has an incentive to rock the boat or change things.
JK: Boom has drawn comparisons to the Concord. What lessons have you learned from the Concord and its design and how will Boom’s aircraft differ? Why will Boom succeed in supersonic travel where Concord failed?
BS: The Concord was just a marvelous technical accomplishment. What was done in the 1960s with slide rules, drafting paper, and wind tunnels compared to what we have today with everything digital and new materials is phenomenally impressive. Nevertheless, the Concord was missing one major component: a real commercial model. Concord built a very impressive airplane with 100 seats on it, where the fares needed to be around $20,000. The problem is, especially with the travel volume in the 1980s and 1990s, airlines could not find 100 people willing to spend $20,000 just to travel at Mach 2. Even on the most profitable route on the planet, New York to London, the airplane, on average, flew half empty. Then if you put the aircraft on a less dense route than New York - London, airlines would not come close to filling all the seats.
The problem with the Concorde was even though it was built with amazing technology, it was done with the motivation of doing something technologically impressive to compete technologically with the Soviets. It was not done with the idea of building something affordable for passengers, profitable to airlines, and can achieve some real scale. They did not start with the market and worked backward to what the airplane had to be. Rather they just wanted to build a cool airplane, which they did. But they did not produce a plane that changed how people traveled because they did not look at the economics or the market.
Two things are different between our airliner Overture and the Concord. First and foremost, we started with the market and then worked backward to what the airplane needed to be. In order to make supersonic flight mainstream, the fares need to be lowered so more people can afford to fly on it more often. Then we needed to construct the airplane relative to the fares so the airlines can fill the seats and make a profit not just on a couple of routes but on hundreds of routes around the planet. With the technology we have, the fares can be reduced by three-quarters from what it was on the Concord. Instead of being four times more expensive than a first class ticket, this can be similar to the price of business class today. On a 777, there are sixty to seventy business class seats. So we started with building an all-business class, supersonic airliner, profitable at fares similar to business class, with 64 seats on the airplane. This means that airlines can fill the seats profitably on hundreds of routes. In doing so, we will see supersonic service between New York and London, Seattle to Tokyo, Los Angeles to Sydney, and Miami to Madrid. There are over 800 hundred routes where people can benefit from significant time savings, and airlines can have good economics on the routes. That is enabled by picking the right design parameters, for example, the range of the aircraft, the capacity, the efficiency, and the cost. Meanwhile, filling the aircraft with state-of-the-art technology such as carbon fiber composites, software-optimized aerodynamics, fly-by-wire flight controls, and enhanced vision systems for takeoff and landing. Today, we have a much better palette of technology to paint a more thoughtfully selected airplane.
JK: Does the existing ban on supersonic flights over land influence possible routes for Boom as a majority of flights are flown over land?
BS: Before Boom, the conventional wisdom was that if supersonic travel is not allowed over land, there is no market. As an entrepreneur, I have learned never to accept a qualitative answer to a quantitative question. So we created a model where over land, the aircraft will fly right under the speed of sound, which is a 20% speed advantage versus the speed of a Boeing or Airbus aircraft, and then out over the ocean where there is no one to hear a sonic boom, we will fly at twice the speed of other airliners today. Even with all of those constraints, there is a significant number of routes that would be profitable for airlines. Now, it would be better to fly supersonically over land because we could connect Los Angeles and New York in two and a half hours.
From day one, we created a product roadmap where we do not need to solve every problem on day one. We ruthlessly simplified and only used technology proven efficient, safe, reliable, and operated within existing regulatory frameworks. Once we do that and serve Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours, people will want the flight between Seattle and Washington, DC, to be shorter. Then we will introduce our second product, which has a quieter sonic boom, and the rules will revolve around it. Ultimately, we want there to be a supersonic flight for everybody everywhere. There is no need to achieve the unattainable in one step. Instead, we can achieve the same outcome in incremental steps. Parallel to Tesla, they started with an electric sports car, then built an electric luxury sedan and a smaller sedan for a much larger market. We want to enable everyone to have a supersonic flight.
JK: Japan Airlines, United, and American have all ordered the Overture airliners. When do you expect deliveries to begin and has the delay to find an engine partner pushed back the Overture expected entry into commercial service?
BS: The target for certification to carry passengers is 2029. Only then can we start delivering airplanes and carrying passengers. We are doing what every new successful aerospace company does with our Symphony engine program, which is taking responsibility for that program ourselves. We are designing the airplane and the engine simultaneously with great partners such as FTT, GE Additive, and Standard Aero. This approach accelerates the program. When the Symphony engine program was announced, we could keep our target certification date. The approach has allowed the engineering teams to work much faster than with a legacy engine manufacturer, where they were trying to shoehorn a subsonic engine into a supersonic airplane.
JK: Boom wanted to begin test flights on the prototype in 2021. But this has not happened yet. What are the hurdles that have prevented that prototype from flying?
BS: As a new company, we wanted to build, experience, and learn lessons on something smaller and simpler, which is why we built the XB-1 prototype, such that when we build the Overture, we get it right the first time. As we moved through that process, we learned a lot and found many opportunities for improvement, particularly with the focus on safety. The safety culture is the most important thing we have built at Boom. Whenever there is an opportunity to improve safety, even if it comes at the cost of dollars or time, we take it when it is a material improvement. With the XB-1, we have deployed a multitude of improvements, from digital stability control to improved landing gear. These improvements have taken extra time that was not anticipated on day one. Although we would have liked for the process to have gone faster, we are proud of our decision to set the safety bar very high. Today, the XB-1 is in the Mojave Desert, about to do the fastest taxi test it has ever done. We look forward to getting that aircraft in the air later this year. But it will only happen when all the necessary safety testing has been completed, and we are confident that it will be a successful outcome.
JK: What do you consider your greatest achievement in the airline industry?
BS: The thing I find most heartening is we have locked on to something people want. Nobody wants to spend more time on airplanes. Airplanes exist to bring people closer together. Faster flight is about opening up endless possibilities, such as where people can vacation and do business or who people can get to know and even fall in love with. The vision inspires everyone I have talked to, and we have set out to deliver that. That buoys me, but I also feel a great burden of responsibility to finish what we started. When the Concord would reach Mach 1, there was a large screen in the airplane that displayed the speed, and the flight attendants would come down the aisle and offer passengers champagne and caviar to celebrate reaching supersonic speed. It will be similar on the initial Overture flights, but the moment I am looking forward to is when passengers find it annoying because supersonic flight is normal.
JK: We started this interview talking about your background in the aviation industry. What advice do you have for young people trying to start a career in the aviation industry?
BS: My advice for anyone starting their career, whether in the aviation industry or elsewhere, is to find what you love. Find what you want to do so much that it is unimaginable to get paid because you would pay to do it. If you don't find it yet, don't give up; keep trying, and don't settle. In my experience, if you find the thing you want to contribute, it unlocks an ability that you didn't think you had. Especially as a founder, working on something you don't love is too hard and does make any sense.
