How an outsider built the first independent supersonic jet

Executive overview

Commercial supersonic flight died with the Concorde in 2003 — not because the technology failed, but because the economics did. Blake Scholl, a software engineer with no aerospace background, ran the numbers and found the path to profitable supersonic travel hiding in a spreadsheet.

Boom Supersonic built the XB1, history's first independently developed supersonic jet, as a proof-of-concept before moving to Overture — a 165-seat airliner targeting Mach 1.7 and business-class fares by 2029.

Passion outlasts credentials: the right question asked by the right outsider unlocked what the industry had written off.

Why the Concorde failed and what changed

• Concorde failed on economics, not technology — $20,000 tickets, 100 seats, flew half empty
• The key question: how much more efficient would an airplane need to be to hit business-class fares?
• Four inputs predict an airplane's performance: lift-drag ratio, propulsive efficiency, structural efficiency, Mach number
• A Stanford professor told Scholl his conservative assumptions were actually achievable
• The industry suffered a bystander effect: supersonic flight was obviously good, so if nobody was doing it, there must be a reason
• Qualitative claims ("market's too small", "sonic booms too loud") were being used to dismiss quantitative questions

From spreadsheet to airplane

• Scholl gave himself a year after leaving Groupon to explore the idea without pressure
• He taught himself calculus and physics via Khan Academy; took an airplane design class
• Built parallel models: a global air travel tab and a technical performance tab
• Day zero in aerospace: zero LinkedIn connections in the industry
• Broke in via a former Groupon colleague now at SpaceX; flew himself to meetings to establish credibility
• Used recursive referrals — asking every contact for their top-five ideal teammates — to reach the best people in the field within a few levels

Building Boom with a small team

• XB1 built by roughly 50 people on a modest budget by aerospace standards
• Hired early-career engineers from SpaceX and Boeing before they were "corrupted" by big aerospace
• Kept a handful of veterans on speed dial to prevent mistakes — but didn't defer to them wholesale
• Constraints forced innovation; small high-calibre teams outperform large ones on novel problems
• Iterated mistakes on the smaller XB1 rather than on the full-scale Overture

Overture and the road to 2029

• Overture targets 165 passengers at Mach 1.7 on 100% sustainable fuel
• New York to London in ~3h 45m; Tokyo to Seattle in ~4h 30m at business-class fares
• Solved the sonic boom problem, enabling overland routes — a major barrier for past supersonic programs
• Goal: first passengers by 2029

Lessons for founders

• Work on what you'd never give up on, not what you already know
• Skills and knowledge are learnable; passions are not
• Founder motivation is undervalued — belief in the cause sustains through the hardest days
• Ambitious ideas are often hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone willing to defy the bystander effect
• The discomfort of not knowing if you can pull it off feels the same at any company — so aim big