Blake Scholl: Why Plane Speed Stalled, Supersonic Commercial Flight, & Revolutionizing the Engine

Good morning.

Houston, we have a problem.

In 1969, we landed on the Moon and we flew an airliner through the sound barrier.

Yet more than half a century later, we can't go to the Moon and we can't fly faster than the speed of sound.

The legacy, the political legacy of Concorde was a ban on supersonic flight over the U.S. Boeing brought us into the jet age in 1957 with the 707, but fast-forward to today and their latest airliner is a literal carbon fiber copy of their first.

By the way, we have interns born after the last time Boeing launched a new airplane in 2004.

This is insane.

But imagine, imagine an alternate timeline in which innovation in flight had continued.

What if we could cross the Atlantic in three and a half hours? What if Sydney were as accessible as Honolulu is today? What would that do for business, for culture, even for love? Who could do something about this? 12 years ago, I was a software engineer and an ads guy from Amazon and Groupon.

The idea that somebody with nothing more than a pilot's license could do something about this seemed laughable.

In 2015, I pitched my old big boss, Jeff Bezos, on Boom's seed round, and he passed.

[smacks lips] And then he wrote this in the 2015 Amazon shareholder letter: "There are certain things that only large companies can do.

No matter how good an entrepreneur you are, you're not gonna build an all-composite airliner in your garage startup, not one that you'd wanna fly on anyway." [audience laughing] I took that a little personally.

[audience laughing] But I don't blame Jeff.

This is what our garage looked like back then.

[audience laughing] And th- this was actually a slide from our pitch deck.

That's, that is in fact a supersonic airliner mockup made from cardboard, plywood, and seats from Office Depot.

But big things often have humble beginnings.

And fast-forward to last year and Boom became the first private company ever to build a supersonic jet.

[audience applauding] Something that the big companies would've put thousands of people on, we did with just 50 really dedicated men and women.

And when we flew that airplane, we had the first supersonic installation of Starlink, so people around the world could tune in, watching th- a video filmed on an iPhone, streamed via Starlink.

And my favorite part was the pictures that people started sending me from classrooms.

Kids that would've tuned out on flight instead tuned in.

[audience applauding] Some of them stood up, and some of them even jumped up and down.

[audience laughing] Isn't that great? One of those is a future chief engineer, I guarantee it.