The last flight of a commercial supersonic airliner took place on October 24, 2003, when British Airways Flight BA002 departed JFK and landed, in retirement, at London’s Heathrow. The flight took fewer than three-and-a-half hours, with a ticket costing about $20,000 in today’s money. Nowadays, the shortest flight along this path is at least five-and-a-half hours, just one example of the unsettling regression in certain kinds of progress that has perplexed the modern age. Why, more than two decades later, do we have no more supersonic commercial flights, enduring travel times equivalent to those of the late 1960s? Why, in an age of reusable rockets and artificial intelligence, has civil aviation stood still?

In 2014, Boom Supersonic was founded with the goal of making supersonic travel mainstream. If successful, Boom will achieve something that no American startup has since the Douglas Aircraft Corporation was founded in 1921: enter the commercial airliner market from scratch and challenge an industry dominated by entrenched incumbents. Boom’s efforts have already yielded major regulatory breakthroughs. Since the 1970’s, the FAA has prohibited supersonic flight over land due to sonic booms. In 2025, Boom was instrumental in persuading the White House to sign an executive order directing civil aviation authorities to revisit and modernize these rules.

I sat down with Blake Scholl, the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, to discuss the disappearance of supersonic passenger flight, the consolidation of the aerospace industry, and his attempt to reintroduce founder-led innovation into commercial aerospace. Through Boom Supersonic and its proposed Overture airliner, Scholl is betting that faster transoceanic and overland travel can become commercially viable at scale for the first time in history. What follows is a transcript of our conversation.

CB: What did it take to build the US aerospace industry into what it is, with the primes, with the state of our technology, with the considerable power our aerospace industry allows us to project?

BS: I think this is a story of the role of entrepreneurship in innovation — what happens when it dies and what happens when it comes back. If you think about the first 50 years of flight, from the Wright Brothers through to the 1960s, this was entrepreneurially led innovation. The Wright Brothers were bicycle entrepreneurs who wanted to try their hand at making something new and important. And there was a golden age. Company creation started in 1903 with the Wright Brothers’ first flight, then went to 1921 when Douglas Aircraft was founded. By the way, it was another 95 years before the next commercial aircraft company was founded. And that was Boom. We had a half century of these founder-led companies doing incredible things. The last founder retired in the 1960s — and again, I’m talking commercial aviation here. If you look at private jets, it went on a little longer. But if you look at every major acceleration in aircraft, it came from a founder-led company. De Havilland actually introduced the first jetliner in the late 1950s while de Havilland himself was still running his company.

One trend was the retirement of the founders, which happened in the ‘60s. And another trend was this pivot in what was driving the vectors of innovation. I think we had entrepreneurially led — which really means customer- and use-case-led — innovation. What entrepreneurs do is figure out what people need, if only they knew how to invent it themselves, and build it, whether for a commercial customer or a defense customer. And so we went from this tiny little biplane to the most incredible intercontinental jetliners. And I think we peaked in some ways with the SR-71 Blackbird, also in the 1960s. By the end of the ‘60s, though, we moved from an entrepreneur-led, use-case-led model of innovation to a glory-and-national-prestige model of innovation.

I have a pretty controversial opinion here. In 1969 we landed on the moon, and also in 1969 we flew Concorde for the first time. And I think both of those were massive mistakes, and we would have had far more progress if we hadn’t made them. What happened is instead of having use-case, capitalistically driven innovation, we started doing things because they looked good on the world stage. We literally landed a man on the moon. Miraculous technical accomplishment, don’t get me wrong. Super inspiring. But we did it to beat the Russians there, and then we didn’t know what to do next. And it’s certainly not sustainable to spend 4% of the federal budget continuing to put more flags on the moon. We can’t afford it. We built an entire technology behind that that is entirely unaffordable and unsustainable. I don’t think you could have found someone in 1969 who was so pessimistic that — if you asked the most pessimistic person in 1969, “Tell me about air travel and space travel in 2026” — you’d find a single one who said, “You can’t go to the moon, you can’t fly supersonic.” It would have seemed absurd.

CB: It seems like it’s pretty much identical today, except maybe the food’s a bit worse, in terms of commercial air travel from the late ‘60s.

BS: I mean, we have made progress in optimizing the machine. Safety has gotten better, efficiency has gotten better, and affordability has gotten better. And those are real gains, but the basic capability hasn’t gotten any better.

Boeing’s latest airliner, the 787, is a highly optimized version of their first jetliner, the 707. It’s far more optimized, but it’s the same machine, the same concept, the same speed. And there’s been no radical rethink. It’s just optimization.

CB: I think one of the lessons of the Soviet Union was that centralization is kind of a bad thing. It’s not good for innovation, right? And it seems like since the Cold War ended, we’ve gone in that direction.

BS: Fundamentally, why does communism not work? It’s a lack of freedom, which means you turn off people’s brains, right? If you’re not free to do, you’re not free to think. And I think the human mind is the source of all progress. Then you’ve got, on top of it, central planning, which means that if you do have any brains involved, it’s a small number that are isolated from the real impact, and whose motivations are disconnected from the real impact.

But then what did we do in the ‘60s? We were competing with the Russians. And how did we compete with them? We started all these centrally planned aerospace projects. Apollo was a communist-style project. And I know this is sacrilege to say, but it’s really true. This was a government-spec project where the goal was to plant an American flag. It was not capitalistic in any sense of the term.

And Concorde, which was a joint venture between the French and British governments, was the exact same thing. It was like, “Hey, let’s show that Western technology beats Soviet technology.” The space race was bipolar. It was the Soviets versus America. The supersonic race was actually tripolar at first. There were the Soviets, the Europeans, and the Americans. And we did the same thing with supersonic in America that we did with space. There was an FAA-spec, taxpayer-funded supersonic transport. Concorde was Mach 2, twice the speed of sound, 100 seats. The American competitor was supposed to be Mach 3, 300 seats. And by the way, they had no idea how to make the affordability work such that 300 people could afford to fly on it. It made no economic sense. Concorde made no economic sense.

At the time Concorde was built, you’d find roughly a couple dozen first-class seats on an airliner. And then Concorde proposes to have 100 seats with fares a multiple of first class. It makes no sense. You just can’t find that many passengers. This is Econ 101. The more expensive the thing is, the fewer people will buy it. The more expensive the fare, the smaller the airplane needs to be. Again, no capitalist would make this mistake.

CB: What went wrong with the Soviet supersonic airliner?

BS: People called it Concordski. It was basically the same airplane concept, roughly the same speed, roughly the same size, maybe not as well built. It definitely didn’t make any sense economically. In the Soviet Union you couldn’t find 100 people willing to pay four times first class to go Mach 2. And then the airplane didn’t work super well either. There was a famous crash at an air show, and so it didn’t even last as long as Concorde did.

CB: It’s an interesting paradox. You can have a fantastic, even groundbreaking technology that’s just a terrible business, and you can also have a great business that’s built on some kind of primitive or very simple, non-innovative technology, right?

BS: I think Marc Andreessen coined, or at least popularized, the term “product-market fit.” And the most important thing is: What are you making? Who is it for? Why is it any good? And these things have to mesh. I think entrepreneurs basically exist for the purpose of creating new things that have product-market fit. But when the taxpayers write a check, there’s no such thing as product-market fit.

The important thing is: Is it valuable to an audience that matters? That’s what private innovation does. Because if you don’t make something that’s valuable to an audience that matters, you don’t get paid. You go away, and the capital allocators don’t give you any more capital.

This is the free-market system. On the other hand, there is no feedback loop like that with the government. Glory projects get rewarded for glory. And you’re absolutely right: those guys can do technologically impressive things. Concorde was technologically super impressive. Apollo was super impressive. And some things were probably invented faster than they otherwise would have been. But if you pull the camera back and ask, on net, was it good? I think the answer is, sadly but obviously, no. Apollo did not lead to more space exploration. It led to less. Concorde did not lead to more supersonic travel. It led to less.

CB: What does it take for a country to have a real aerospace industry?

BS: Aerospace is really hard, so you’ve got to have a robust talent pipeline. And that’s a flywheel that is hard to get spinning. Advanced jet engine technology is one of the few things that China has not been able to copy from the West yet. And we can make turbine blades in the US and Europe that radically outclass anything made in China. That is a statement you cannot make about very many kinds of products. That knowledge flywheel — which is really about what’s in the minds of the engineers and how they teach the next generation — is super, super important.

CB: What were the primary constraints in founding Boom technologically, from a business perspective, and from a regulatory oversight perspective?

BS: Here’s the shocking thing: there were no technological constraints. When I started working on Boom about 12 years ago, one of the most important early discoveries was that we already had the technology required to build an economically viable supersonic transport. There was a book that NASA had published called Commercial Supersonic: The Road Ahead. And it was kind of a systematic, technology-by-technology breakdown: where’s the state of the art, and where does it need to be?

They were looking at two different product ideas. One was a supersonic private jet for the ultra-wealthy, and the other was a 300-seat supersonic jumbo airliner. And they said, well, you can’t do the private jet because private jets fly mostly over land. And if you can’t fly supersonic over land because you haven’t solved sonic boom technically or regulatorily, that’s stuck. There’s no market. Decades of R&D would be required in order to solve sonic boom and make a supersonic private jet viable.

And then you can’t do the 300-seat supersonic jumbo because nobody knows how to make that efficient enough that the airfares would be affordable to enough people to get 300 at a time on board the airplane. So their conclusion was that decades of R&D were required.

I remember reading that and thinking, are those really the only two ideas? And it seemed fairly obvious that today roughly 50% of international air travel dollars are spent in business class, and that’s where about 80% of the operating profit comes from for international airlines. And these are people who are paying top dollar, sometimes even $20,000 for a round-trip ticket with a flat bed, because the flight is long and they want to sleep through it. And so the airlines charge a lot for flying beds.

By the way, if your flight is faster, you don’t need the bed. And you can improve passenger density. So that was the founding idea of Boom: let’s not assume any new technology. Let’s not assume any new regulations. Let’s use existing technology, and let’s build an airplane that is commercially viable at fares similar to what people already pay in subsonic business class.
And it turns out you don’t need to invent anything fundamentally to make that happen. All the technology is there, and it had been there for about 10 years before the company was founded. Theoretically, Boom could have been founded 10 years earlier.

CB: That kind of confirms the great man theory of history, right? Sometimes it just takes a single actor with some agency to make something significant happen.

BS: I think it’s true generally. And I think in Silicon Valley people tend to tell you that if your idea is any good, there are already several teams working on it, and that if nobody else is working on it, there’s probably something wrong with the idea. The “why now?” question is another version of the same thing. Why now? Why is this only just now possible? The assumption is that things get done at the earliest moment they’re possible. And I think that’s just not true.

CB: I think that assumes a lot of efficiency that probably doesn’t exist.

BS: It doesn’t exist. And the fact that people hold this theory actually reduces efficiency. It effectively creates a bystander effect.

CB: How does the commercial air travel business model work, and what are the primary inefficiencies in the current model?

BS: Commercial air travel is really a bundled three-class product. If you look at the anatomy of a Boeing or Airbus long-haul airplane, you’ve got business class, you’ve got some premium, and you’ve got some coach. And the whole thing works because it’s a bundle of three classes. People say you make money up front and recover costs in the back.

Boeing and Airbus are both in the business of selling these three-class airplanes. And today, we don’t have the technology yet — though I intend to create it at Boom — but we can’t do supersonic at economy fares. We can do it at business-class fares. Basically, we’re cutting off the business-class cabin, pulling it out of this big airplane, and building an airplane that’s all business.

It’s an interesting case of disruptive innovation, because if Boeing did this, they would blow up the economics of their wide-body products. They’d have to cannibalize their system product line. And ordinarily companies might say it’s better for me to cannibalize myself than to let somebody else cannibalize me. But in practice, only a few companies are willing to eat themselves for the future. Steve Jobs, for example, was willing to destroy the iPod business to create the iPhone business.

CB: I understand you have manufacturing facilities in Colorado and North Carolina?

BS: Yeah, we’re live in Colorado now, and we’re standing up North Carolina.

CB: What kind of machine tools do you need to build an aircraft factory? Where do you even get machine tools from these days?

BS: There’s an enormous variety of different production processes to build the different kinds of parts that go into airplanes. If you focus on the engine, which is primarily metallic, we’re talking about castings, investment castings, forgings, all of which basically get ground or machined down to net shape.

The equipment you need for that comes from all over the world, and often not the US. Japan and Europe are, in many cases, leaders in machine tools. We have a number of Makino and Mazak CNC machines and mills that are designed in Japan, sometimes built-made in Japan, sometimes built-made in the US.

CB: What were the lessons you learned in building XB-1, the supersonic demonstrator that you tested last year? What surprised you once you actually had the data from the test flight and from seeing it become a real, tangible aircraft?

BS: The overall plan was: step one, demonstrate that we have the technology for a commercial supersonic airplane by going and building and flying the first ever independently developed supersonic jet made out of airliner technology. We did that with XB-1. Mission accomplished.

Step two — and this was a surprise along the way — was to solve sonic boom and repeal the ban on supersonic flight over land in the US. That was a consequence of the XB-1 program. That’s done.

Step three was also a surprise. Take our engine technology that we’d originally planned for our airliner and deploy it first on the ground for power generation. So we are delivering our supersonic engine technology first to AI hyperscalers that are using it to power AI data centers. We’ve got over a billion dollars in backlog for our power turbine product.

The next step is taking all the money and the knowledge from that product and using it to finish development of the airliner. And then we all get to fly supersonic. Ultimately, that becomes a whole family of products, from large airliners to small private jets. And I think supersonic replaces subsonic, ultimately, for every passenger on every route.

What was surprising was that we solved sonic boom. We founded Boom with the idea of just focusing on international routes first, putting the booms over water. You don’t have to solve it over land. It turned out that it was much easier than we thought. We were able to solve it really in software. We demoed that, and then we found ourselves — with the combination of the demo and a kind of deregulation-oriented political environment — taking only 115 days from the demo to the regulatory change, which has got to be some kind of speed record in and of itself.

CB: How soon will Overture, your flagship supersonic airliner, be a reality?

BS: On the order of 5 years, maybe a little bit less. We’re doing this as fast as we possibly can. But it’s one of the most complex, safety-critical machines ever made, and we’re doing it as a brand-new company.

CB: The world has changed a lot every time travel times have halved. It used to take two months to cross the Atlantic, then a week, and so on. What do you think the implications will be when travel times are halved by your product?

BS: The really cool thing is that we’re not smart enough to predict or even imagine that. The best clues are if you look back and ask, what were the second-order consequences of the jet age? Because this has happened before. We’ve doubled the speed of air transit before.

What happened? It turns out it opened up a bunch of destinations that otherwise wouldn’t have been destinations. It made Hawaii a destination for the first time. It made it possible for families to vacation in Europe from America. There was a whole bunch of cultural cross-pollination that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

Companies like Nike got their start. What’s the connection between Nike and jets? I stumbled across this while reading Phil Knight’s memoir. In the late 1960s, after business school, he fell in love with Japanese-style running shoes. And Nike got its start importing Japanese running shoes to America. There was no such thing as a chance trip to Japan after business school without jet travel.

There was no Major League Baseball west of the Mississippi before jets. For 100 years, from the founding of Major League Baseball, it was this cluster of teams in the Northeast and it never changed. Then suddenly it changed overnight, and we got teams coast to coast. If you enjoy any kind of major league sports west of the Mississippi, it’s because we’ve got jets that can move teams around.

So you don’t have to get on an airplane to benefit from a faster airplane. There was a story in The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago about how the NFL is closely tracking supersonic because they’re asking whether this makes it viable to put a team in Europe.

CB: How difficult is it to scale speed once you’ve broken the sound barrier? Is it significantly different to build a Mach 1.2 commercial aircraft versus one at Mach 2 or Mach 2.5?

BS: There are step changes in difficulty along the way. What we’ve tried to do is be on the favorable side of a significant speed increase, and initially on the favorable side of step changes in technical difficulty. But it will absolutely ratchet up over time.

Overture One we’re designing for Mach 1.7, because that’s roughly a doubling in speed versus today’s airliners. And yet it’s within a turbofan architecture that can still fly efficiently at that speed and meet takeoff noise compliance, which turns out to be a big design driver.

But we have a technical roadmap to push to far higher speeds than that. And I think ultimately the limit is actually human comfort.

CB: What do you think are the prize routes that are going to be fundamentally transformed by this?

BS: Our modeling says there are going to be at least 1,000 that are significant. Everyone remembers New York to London from the Concorde days, because that was really the one route that almost worked as it was. It was rock stars and royalty who were willing to pay top dollar. And you could leave New York in the morning and make a dinner meeting in London, and if you wanted, come back that same day.

You can generalize that to the eastern US traveling to Western Europe. Effectively, you’re taking what would be a red-eye flight and turning it into a daytime flight. And then coming back to the US, you actually land before you take off in local time. With maybe a five-hour time difference and a three-and-a-half-hour flight, you land 90 minutes before you took off. It’s going to be really awesome.

Some of the really exciting routes are the ones that never worked with Concorde, like the US to Australia. That’s such a terribly long flight today — 16 hours. Even if you manage to sleep on the airplane, when you wake up there’s still a whole other day of misery on the airplane ahead of you. That turns into about an eight-hour flight with Overture, say LA to Sydney. That’s actually a reasonable-length red-eye. Sleep on the airplane, wake up, and you’re there.

The time zones also work out beautifully in some cases. You can go to sleep in Sydney and wake up in LA eight hours later.

There are routes which don’t get much traffic today but suddenly start to sing with supersonic. What about vacationing in Tahiti? What about the Maldives? These are places where the flight time is a real barrier. When you cut flight times in half, all of a sudden it makes more sense.

And then with boomless cruise, there’s also domestic travel. We can shave about 90 minutes off a coast-to-coast flight. That means you could leave New York at 9 a.m. and land in San Francisco at 9:30 a.m. local time. I think there will be scenarios where commuting becomes viable in ways it isn’t today.