Today, we are going to talk about this.
It is without doubt
the most beautiful aircraft
ever to evolve from the mind of man.
Concord retired in 2003,
ever since then we've been stuck traveling
at regular old speeds
but there is a company in Colorado called Boom.
They've raised more than $150 million to build
the first privately funded commercial supersonic plane.
The company was started by a man named Blake Scholl.
He came from the internet and software world
but decided he was gonna be the guy
who would make this machine possible.
And so they'd been at it for a few years.
Overture is the goal,
and before that they are building a plane
that's about a third the size of this thing,
which is called XB-1, and Boom is unveiling it
for the first time, and we get the first look at it.
So let's head to Colorado and hear from Blake
about Boom's progress, and with that,
off we go to Colorado.
So I've been following you guys since what?
Since like 2015, 2016?
I think it was early 2016, yeah.
Give me the whole thesis behind Boom
and what you guys are trying to do.
It's been a really half a century
since we've had a speedup in air travel
when we went from props to jets in the late 1950s,
and in the 1960s and 1970s,
we made the leap to supersonic with Concorde,
but we never made high-speed travel mainstream,
and in fact, when Concorde shut down about 20 years ago,
there was really no plan to pick up where it left off.
And so that's what we're doing at Boom,
we're building high-speed travel
that can be available to more people than ever before.
So I think New York to London in three-and-a-half hours
instead of six-and-a-half,
think the West Coast to a Tokyo in as little
as four-and-a-half hours.
Think of Overture, which is our airliner,
as chopping off the front cabin of a Boeing
or Airbus wide body and making it go really fast.
So it's got between 65 and 85 seats
and we'll get you there in wheels up to wheels down
in about half the time it takes today.
If you fly XB-1 next year,
that would be the first private supersonic plane.
Is that right?
That's right, when we fly XB-1 next year,
it'll be the first independently developed
supersonic jet ever.
Okay.
Tell me just a little bit about your background,
and in retrospect, do you think that's been a service
to what you guys are trying to do?
I went to school for computer science.
I started my career at Amazon
doing automation of online marketing
and as a software engineer, and then as a leader,
but I've loved airplanes since I was a kid.
You fly, right?
I've been flying for fun since college.
I'm one of those people that you know,
you let me behind the controls of an airplane
and, you gotta wrench them outta my hands
'cause it's so much fun,
and it's such a just wonderfully human thing to do,
and technical and physical at the same time.
But I've been watching the supersonic space
since I was in my mid-twenties
and I sort of gave myself a life goal of going Mach two,
and one day I wanted to have my passion for aerospace
intersect with what I was actually working on,
and had no idea when that would happen,
or how it would happen, but I feel very lucky
to be able to do Boom.
Why has it been since 2003,
that nobody tried to do this again?
We're now at the intersection
of what is technologically possible
and what there is a sufficient market demand for,
so since Concorde retired in 03,
there's been a two-and-a-half fold increase
in international travel,
and that creates a lot more markets for supersonic.
But at the same time, we've had all kinds of new technology
that didn't exist in Concorde's day.
We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber composites.
We've gone from loud, inefficient,
environmentally-unfriendly turbo jet engines
to turbofan engines that are much quieter,
much more fuel efficient.
And when you put together all the new technology,
aerodynamics, materials, propulsion,
you can now build an aircraft
that's significantly more efficient than Concorde,
which means it can be available
to tens of millions of people
at fares kinda like what you pay in business class today.
So you guys are doing this in this super methodical way.
You're unveiling right now, this XB-1,
which is your first plane, and tell me about it.
I mean, it's basically a third of the size
of where you're hoping to go with Overture,
which will be your first commercial plane.
So XB-1 is our, think of it as our like
baby prototype for Overture.
We call it Baby Boom for fun.
And it'll go supersonic, it'll be history's first
independently developed supersonic jet.
And you know, for those of you who are familiar
with the early days of SpaceX,
it's in many ways, analogous to the Falcon 1.
Rather than going in building Overture,
we decided it was prudent to take all of our best ideas
for that airplane and then go sub-scale, and do design,
build, fly, learn on a representative aircraft
that is human rated, that actually carries a living pilot.
So we'll be flying XB-1 and just setting speed records
in 2021, so next year, and then as XB-1 goes supersonic
around the end of next year, we're gonna pass the torch
from XB-1 to Overture.
And so all the things we've learned in flight test of XB-1
will inform the final design of Overture,
we're gonna press enter on that around the end of next year,
and then start signing up the rest of our supplier team
for Overture, do the detailed design,
and in 2025, so about five years from now,
we will be with Overture where we are with XB-1 today,
where we're rolling out the first assembled airplane,
and then we'll be in flight test
starting in 2026 with Overture.
So six years from now you're gonna look up
and you'll see Overture aircraft you know, in the skies
setting speed records.
And so we'll be carrying our first passengers
by the end of the decade.
Cool, well, I think we can actually sort of like
have a peek down on the factory floor, right?
With XB-1 kinda coming together.
Yeah, let's go take a look at it.
Here we are overlooking XB-1 in its assembly hangar,
and this is a 67-foot-long aircraft,
so about one third of the scale of Overture,
which will be a bit more than 200 feet long.
And over here, we've got about a 21-foot wingspan.
So this hangar that we're in here is perfect for XB-1,
but Overture wouldn't even fit in the building.
So we're gonna move here in a couple of years
as we start building the first Overture.
So the last few components are going on,
and then we're gonna lower the aircraft down onto a field,
and then we'll be ready to unveil the aircraft to the world.
How many people do you guys have working
on the plane right now?
I've got about 140 people in the company,
of which about 100 are working on XB-1
either physically putting it together,
or finishing the design and the engineering of it.
You can see here, we've got the main landing gear.
That's designed to take 200,000 pounds of load,
we can provide even in a relatively rough landing.
And up above it, this is the intake.
So XB-1 and Overture has just three engines in it.
We've got one on each side underneath the wing,
and then we've got a third one in the tail with that intake
that's mounted dorsal on the back of the airplane.
So we've built this deck
so the airplane could be accessible,
offering control systems.
And we call it the party deck.
Building an airplane,
it's like building an iceberg from the bottom up.
Pilot sits here, but you can get a sense that yeah,
the visibility over this nose isn't gonna be great,
and that's why we brought the camera system
that allows the pilot basically, to have a virtual window
that goes through the nose of the aircraft
and they can see the runway better than they could
on a typical subsonic airplane.
You can see that we've got the nose cone is on now,
and we've got that silver thing sticking out
as the flight test boom.
So that's a piece of equipment that measures airflow,
air speed, air pressure,
temperature well outside of the interference
of the airplane itself.
We kind of reach forward to get a clean measurement,
and then we use that to calibrate the sensors
that are out there for you.
There are many, many, many sensors throughout this,
and then the whole airplane has a real-time data link
down to the ground, a 10-megabit link,
and so we've got real-time video feed
plus all of the sensors real-time off the aircraft,
down to the control room.
So we've got carbon fiber composite wings,
and you'll notice that the wings are relatively small
compared to typical airliner wings.
So that's one of the artifacts of a high-Mach design
is you have relatively less wingspan,
and that, but we've got so much airflow over the wing
so you can still get all of the lift you need.
And then the trick to making it also work at low speed,
is you come in at a very nose-high attitude
called a high-angle of attack, and at that point,
the whole aircraft is in something called vortex lift,
where basically you get a vortex to generate off the nose,
you get a vortex generated off the leading edge of the wing,
and a vortex is basically,
think of it as like a little bit of air that's swirling.
And so it's faster than the typical air around it,
and you'll remember from, you know, Bernoulli's principle
that fast moving air has a pressure drop,
and so that vortex that you have sitting about the wing
generates a low pressure region
well over the high pressure below the wing,
and that's how the airplane flies subsonic.
Well, it's amazing man, and you know,
thank you so much for your time today,
and it's exciting to see how far you guys have come
over these last few years.
Well, thank you, Ashlee.
You've seen it from the very early days.
It certainly has come a ways.