Boom Supersonic's Blake Scholl on overland supersonic travel breakthrough and the path to quieter commercial flight

Summary

A White House executive order issued June 6, 2025 lifts the US overland supersonic flight ban that has been in place since 1973, and Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl learned of the development in real time during the broadcast. Scholl says the policy shift is the direct result of an intensive lobbying campaign that began February 10th, the day Boom announced it could fly supersonic without an audible boom. That announcement earned Scholl an invitation to the West Wing the same night.

The technical and regulatory framework now emerging splits into two tiers. Below Mach 1.3, a supersonic aircraft can be shaped and flown at altitude such that the sonic boom curves back into the upper atmosphere and never reaches the ground, producing no audible event at surface level. That yields roughly a 50% speed increase over subsonic flight. On New York to San Francisco, Scholl frames that as departing at 9:00 a.m. and landing at 9:30 a.m., cutting a roughly three-and-a-half-hour flight to thirty minutes.

For speeds beyond Mach 1.3, some boom will reach the ground, and Scholl argues the policy path there is demonstration-based: show the boom was within an acceptable threshold. He likens boom intensity to the wake of a boat, with size and distance as the key variables. Boom corridors at those speeds would run 50 to 100 miles wide, which Scholl acknowledges creates practical complexity over land. Over ocean, there has never been a restriction, so Boom's first commercial aircraft, Overture, is designed to fly boomless at plus-50% speed over land, then accelerate to full 2x speed once past the coastline.

A bipartisan bill, the Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act, dropped in both the House and Senate three weeks prior to the EO. Scholl still wants it passed to codify the regulatory gains.

On the economics, flying lightly supersonic increases fuel burn but allows more flights per aircraft per day. Scholl says the net effect is that Overture's cost per seat mile at boomless supersonic is roughly equivalent to flying just below the sound barrier, with revenue potential significantly higher given time savings.

Boom's near-term milestones are concrete. The first jet engine is approximately 60% through manufacturing, with a test run planned for later in 2025. Full-scale pre-production prototype construction begins in 2026, and Scholl estimates a first flight roughly three years out.

On manufacturing efficiency, Scholl recounts applying two frameworks drawn from Elon Musk. The first is Musk's "idiot index," the ratio of a finished part's cost to its raw material cost. A set of turbine blades quoted at $1 million from a supplier, against $1,000 in raw materials, carries a 1,000x index. The second, which Scholl calls the "slacker index," measures supply chain lead time against actual production time. Boom was quoted six months and $1 million for 3D-printed turbine blades that physically take 24 hours to print. The 3D printers themselves are off-the-shelf and available in two weeks at $2 million per unit. Boom bought its own, cutting lead time from 180 days to one day and accelerating engineering iteration cycles substantially.