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

to talk to you soon. Thank you guys. You're welcome. Great to see you. See you. We are shifting gears over to the Supersonic world. We have Blake Schaw from Boom. Supersonic. Is the speed limit lifted? Are we post speed limit? I want to go 2,000 mph tomorrow. Smiling. He's smiling. Something must be good happening.

What? What happened today? We've been live for the last few hours. So, we got a text message. We got to have you on. Yeah. Nothing nothing big. We just actually we actually broke the sound barrier today permanently because the band is reversed. No way. That's what Let's go.

John's going to hit the John's going to hit the gong. That's for you, Blake. Congratulations. We've been hoping for this for a long time. So So the rules are going to change and you can go supersonic as fast as you want so long as the sound is a gong. Yep. Oh, that's great.

I would happily let gongs ring upon the the fields of America from sea to signing shining sea. I'd love to see it. Uh I mean I know this news is breaking but uh how did you find out about this? Was there expectation that this was going to happen? Who are the folks who have been working on this?

Uh and then break down what actually happened. Yeah. Well, I mean in a certain sense people have been working on this for decades, you know, since 1973 when it first went in place. And we've been working on it very intensely since February 10th.

Uh which is when we announced we could do we could fly supersonic without an audible boom. Y I think it was uh that uh that night I left LA where our test flights were and went to DC. And by the way it's horrible flight. Much better supersonic. It was like like left at 11 p. m. Got it at like 4:30 a. m. It's awful.

It should totally be supersonic. And then by the time I landed I had an invitation to the West Wing. So um the uh so we you know since then uh what we did what to me felt like a very long frustratingly slow campaign but what everybody tells me in DC is actually supersonic.

Uh so a a bipartisan bill dropped three weeks ago in the House and the Senate um called the Supersonic Aviation Modernization Act which by the way I think we should still pass because that locks in all of today's goodness. Mhm.

Um and uh you know and we just sort of continue to educate people on by the way we don't have to have the boom anymore. And by the way, not all booms are created equal. Not all are bad. And uh that's something a lot of people can get excited about.

So I I mean I know a lot of the technology is about uh flying at very specific speeds at specific al altitudes doing all the math to make sure that the boom bounces back into the atmosphere or something like that. Uh what kind of speeds does that actually work at?

What what are we what what are we expecting because Supersonic goes well past it goes basically infinite, right? Right. Yeah. Exactly. So So there there's sort of two ways you can kind of attackle sonic boom. And like one one is what you're just describing.

Make it go away entirely by making it make a U-turn and go up to space. And the the great thing about that is that there's nothing to argue about whether it's too loud. Um the the less the less great thing is it only works up to about Mach 1. 3. Okay.

You can go about 50% faster, but you can't go 100% faster or 200% faster. Uh, put that in terms of like a commercial airliner. I feel like I fly at like 500 600 miles an hour. You're talking about like 700 800 maybe. Yeah. Let's talk about in terms of flight times.

This is so with with a 50% speed up, which is what's achievable routinely. Uh, you can leave New York at 9:00 a. m. and be in San Francisco at 9:30 a. m. So, it's a three and a half hour flight. Okay. Wow. Which is like that's a W, right? Yeah. That's massive.

Now, you know, if you want to go higher than that, faster than that, uh you have to convince yourself that some some way or other the boom is not a problem. Yeah. Okay. And uh and I don't think people don't agree about the answer to that. Uh you know, I I want to get out there, fly the airplane.

I want to hear some real booms. I've heard a bunch of booms in Mojave, by the way. We were doing our test flights. Booms are common place down in the Mojave Desert. Military makes them all the time. And there's some that kind of get your attention. You're like, "Wow, we probably shouldn't do that.

At least not at least not at night time. That would be at most that's a daytime thing, you know, but there are others that like sound like somebody like dropped a book on the floor and you know and those are, you know, so think of it as like the wake of a boat. The bigger the boat, the bigger the wake.

The closer the boat, the more the wake you feel. Yeah. And so if you have a right-sized boat at a sufficiently far away distance, it really ought to be considered a non-issue. So, uh, so, you know, I think we're still kind of taking in exactly what's the language and the EO.

Um, you know, but my my expectation is that this will be a one-two punch where uh you know, if there's no boom, there's nothing to argue about. And if there is a boom, there should be a way to sort of demonstrate uh that that it wasn't it was an acceptable one. Yeah. Yes.

Uh specific flight corridors where people are opting in or something like that. And yeah, I mean that's it's just a quarter the the you'll hear a not if you're in kind of boomful mode that the boom corridor is actually like 50 or 100 miles wide. Oh, very wide.

So I mean you know we can't build a railroad in this country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like you know which so the positive thing is like I imagine if when you're traveling over oceans we can you know have a little bit more flexibility. Yeah. There there has never been a restriction over ocean.

So so that's the fortunately there's nothing to do there. So, so the way our first airplane overture will do this is it'll fly boomless over land at like plus 50%. And then and and then when we get to the coastline, you know, you gun the throttles and and then you go to full 2x speed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And I'm sure that the economics change when you can do 1. 3 Mach over land. Uh because that's just a there's so much more overland air travel generally. So it's just a bigger market. So it justifies everything in the investment. It does. Yeah. And the economics are actually really interesting, you know.

So if you fly sort of lightly supersonic, it's worse for fuel burn, but you can do so many more flights with the same airplane, you save a bunch of money on other things. And so go so on on overtry going right under the speed of sound and going boomless supersonic is actually the same uh dollars per seat mile.

H interesting, right? Like the fuel slice gets a little bit bigger and the cost side, the cost side like anything, but the revenue is going to be I'd pay 10 times as much to get from Oh yeah. Revenue obviously. I mean, time is money. Save both. Ramp. com. Also, boom. Boom. Supersonic. You can go to both. Time is money.

They're both. Everyone's gonna save you time. Um, but if the boom comes down, reflects, bounces back up, and I'm in a plane there. Is that going to break my plane's windows? What What's the risk? So, okay. So, so a few people asked that question. It's a good question.

The answer is Concord did that for 27 years, and nobody noticed. Oh, interesting. And and and one time they tried to test it. We know the pilots that were doing this.

They sort of arranged for like a 747 to be here while Concord's kind of passing overhead and they they had told everybody on the 747 that they might get to hear something and then they didn't hear anything and everybody was super disappointed. Okay.

So, it just doesn't really affect maybe you feel something that feels like turbulence. I don't know. It's like a It's like a It's a nothing burger, but it's not going to blow the windows out, which is like the worry, of course. No.

I mean, if if that was going to happen, you know, Concord have knocked out every other airplane in the sky. Yeah, of course. Airplanes fly above. Yeah. Airplanes fly below. So So Conqueror is booming for 27 years over the Atlantic and like nobody got hurt. Yeah. Wild.

Um the way to look at this, by the way, is like the uh like the energy intensity and some of the physics of Sonic Boom are very similar to thunder, right?

So you could be like, "Oh my gosh, like you know, could could boom over the water like disturb the mating habs of like, I don't know, the aquatic spotted owl or something. " Sure. Uh, well, anything that was going to be put out of commission by a sonic boom was long ago put out a commission by a thunderstorm. Sure.

Yeah. Sure. Um, we So, was there anything was there anything to you that was surprising about the EO? Uh, what what what what what did you maybe not anticipate? I mean, I had I I admit I haven't read it word for word yet. Yeah. Uh, I read I read the back partied and I need to like calm down and read it word for word.

Uh there's there's a lot of stuff in it um uh that that appears to sort of like not just say great you should be able to fly supersonic but you know advances R&D and you know there's I don't know I got to read all of it. I want to say what it says read it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure there's a ton of work to be done on like the licensing and approval and and everything that happens with certification. Some of those things might need to change or speed up. Some of them might need to stay in place if it's a safety issue of course. Uh but what's next for the company?

What's the next milestone that you're tracking? uh is let's go. So we're building our first engine. Okay. Power the you know and that thing is like 60% uh the parts are in the manufacturing process. Uh and uh we'll go uh run that bad boy later this year.

You know that the skeptics always say the startup can't build a jet engine from scratch. So we'll find out. Yeah. And uh then we'll start building the first uh fullscale pre-production prototype overure next year. Very cool. Uh it'll be roughly three years. Okay. today to to be back and like there's a bird in the air.

But you know last time that what we flew it looked like a fighter jet. Yeah. Next time it's that it's the overture which it looks like a it kind of looks like a Concord and a 747 had a baby. Yep. Amazing. It's got this like little hump up at front.

You know it's you know it's not a double-decker but uh but it's a really unique airplane. Not yet. We have to get the goldplated 747. Those are really hot right now. Lots of people giving them to their friends and so I could imagine uh handing these out to world leaders being pretty effective.

I have I have to ask did you have any did did you get a chance to watch the rehearsal by Nathan Fielder? Uh you're giving me a blank stare so I assume you're too locked in. I I I don't I I is this sounds like a pop culture thing of which I'm ignorant. Yeah. Yeah.

Well well the reason it's relevant is because this this sort of comedian Nathan Fielder um uh go you know has this show called The Rehearsal. He learns how to actually fly a commercial aircraft to demonstrate to the FAA some of the issues they have around safety. uh specifically on pilot communication.

He he identifies that the vast majority of of of commercial air crashes that have happened over the last few decades have been the result of a a captain making a mistake and the second in command not having the kind of energy or or confidence to stand up to them because they're meeting for the first time.

And so he dissects this in a bunch of hilarious ways.

My main takeaway uh from your answers that is extremely bullish for boom that you have no idea uh there's a certain class of hard techch founder like I I always notice Scott Nolan uh he'll post like he'll repost like their announcement like four days later because he's like so in the trenches that like I'm like Scott like like you you know you launched three days ago like you should be rep retweeting at least like the post because he's so offline.

Um but anyway speak I have one last question about being online. uh you've been learning from Elon about manufacturing online. You had an interesting back and forth where you were talking about uh manufacturing parts. I barely followed it. Can you explain what did you learn from Elon about manufacturing uh and and Yeah.

Yeah. break that interaction down. So So Elon has this thing he talks about called the idiot index, which is it's a beautiful Elonism, right? Yeah.

uh where it's it's sort of a like you've got a final part and you divide it by the the part cost like say it's a turbine blade it costs uh I don't know a mill a real world example we've got the set of turbine blades costs a million dollars for a set of turbine blades what is the raw material cost $1,000 what's the index a thousandx like the cost goes up a thousandfold in the manufacturing process and so it's a sort of measure of like what's the what's the money efficiency of the manufacturing process there's another thing that I think is actually even more important that we we call we call the slacker index.

Yeah. And the slacker index is how long it takes to get something out of the supply chain divided by how long it actually takes to make it. Oh, so we're time based, right?

Like so we were getting these t these 3D printed turbine blades for our first jet engine and we go quote them in the stupid old aerospace supply chain and the quote comes back and it's like it's six months and a million dollars. Yep. And I was like, "Wow. " Okay. Okay.

Well, how long does it actually take to print the blades? Oh, like 24 hours. Like, so what's going on the other 179 days? You're like waiting for? And I was like, oh, it must be that the machine is like really hard to get and they're like only a few. Well, no. Turns out the machines are off the shelf.

They've got them in inventory. You can get one in two weeks. And by the way, do they cost? $2 million. So, for the price of two engines worth of blades, we were able to buy a 3D printer and print our own blades. Yeah.

And and so what happened, by the way, it compounds from there is if you if engineers can only make a a new blade every six months, they like really work the blade design because they don't want to get it wrong because if they get it wrong, it takes six months to fix it.

But if they print in the one next day, then all of a sudden the rate of iteration goes up and they're an engineering hand ringing and trying to get it right the first time goes away. Yep. So you want low idiot index and you want low slacker index. I love it. I love it.

Well, hopefully this EO unlocks a lot of that and we can bring down the idiot index, bring down the the uh the slacker index and supersonic flight man definitely had a high idiot index. So, I'm I'm glad I'm glad that's been uh deep. Well, fantastic. We are one step closer to a supersonic podcast. I love it.

And I cannot wait. Yeah, I haven't forgotten what you're on. I know. I know. It's happening. It's happening. Well, congratulations. Uh enjoy the weekend. Hopefully you can advance the technology but also celebrate a little bit. Uh and we will talk to you soon, Blake. Thanks so much for hopping on for jumping on.

Congratulations. Bye. Bye. Give a little air horn for supersonic flight. Yeah, I love it. Uh I can't wait to hop on a boom supersonic. Take it to an exotic local. Stay at a wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.