This car goes 250 miles per hour. This train goes 350 miles per hour.
This plane goes 550 miles per hour. And those are all slower than this bullet,
which travels at 800 miles per hour. But this new plane from Boom Supersonic
goes over 1,000 miles per hour, and there’s a good chance it could change how we travel forever.
The only faster way to get around might be using a SpaceX rocket, but Elon’s plan for
that is still completely untested. Supersonic planes have been around
since the 1960s, but we’ll get into the history of high-speed travel a bit later.
First, we need to talk about the founder of Boom Supersonic.
Blake Scholl is on a mission to bring supersonic travel to the masses
and he’s making solid progress. “Imagine New York to London
in three and a half hours for about the same fare you pay in business class today.”
In just 5 years he’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars,
hired dozens of engineers, and built a working prototype
called XB-1 that can travel at Mach 2.2. It’s amazing progress, but the most impressive
part is that he had zero experience in the aerospace industry. So how’d he do it?
Even though Blake doesn’t have an aerospace background, he is an engineer by training.
He studied computer science in college and then went to work for Amazon all the way back in 2001.
While there, he built an automated system that would buy Google ads for Amazon products.
“That turned into a $300 million dollar P&L by the time I was 24”
Joining a high-growth startup like Amazon in the early days is one of the best ways to accelerate
your career. No big company would hire a 24 year old to manage a $300 million dollar piece of their
business, but by joining a risky venture, Blake was able to develop management skills that helped
make Boom a reality later on. After a few years at Amazon,
Blake wanted to start his own company, so he launched an app called Barcode Hero.
“I’m Blake Scholl, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Barcode Hero"
“Barcode Hero lets you zap a product barcode with your phone
to find a competitor’s pricing, share your thoughts or recommendations”
The app received positive reviews and was growing steadily, but mobile commerce was an
extremely competitive market back in 2010. It’s now extremely common for startups to
spend years completely focused on building a great product before trying to make money,
but back then, questions about profitability popped up much earlier.
“Can you tell me how far along you need to be before you make a profit? Well, to be honest
we’re a ways away from that. Our business model is to create a shopping application that people
want to use when they’re in a store to help them make better decisions about what to buy.”
So in 2012, Groupon acquired Blake’s company for an undisclosed sum and shut down Barcode Hero.
It doesn’t look like it was an amazing outcome, but Blake clearly wasn’t deterred.
He wanted to go bigger with his next startup and so he set his sights higher, literally.
Blake had been flying planes since he was in college and always dreamt of having a
real impact on the aviation industry. He didn’t have the perfect resume to start a
company that builds airplanes, but that didn’t bother him. After all, the Wright Brothers had
only built bicycles before they made the first airplane. And Elon Musk was running a payments
company before launching SpaceX. So Blake founded Boom Supersonic and
began building a team around the idea of safe and sustainable high-speed travel.
One of the first major milestones for the company was joining the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
Although YC is typically known for funding software startups like Airbnb,
Stripe, and Coinbase, the partners at Y Combinator love all ambitious entrepreneurs.
Building physical things is usually much harder than writing software. There are long research and
development cycles, expensive manufacturing bills, and plenty of regulatory hurdles.
But Blake developed a really interesting method for overcoming these challenges.
“At Boom, we believe that life happens in person, and that real face time beats FaceTime”
Blake is obsessed with the idea that in person interactions are inherently more valuable
than conversations over the phone or email. And he really lives this mantra. Y Combinator’s
Demo Day was quickly approaching and Blake was going to have to present Boom to a huge group
of investors. He needed to demonstrate that airlines would actually buy the supersonic
planes he was going to build. Emails and phone calls to airlines were going nowhere,
so he decided to hop on a plane and get some face time with Richard Branson. Virgin Galactic was
rolling out a new Spaceship and Blake knew that this was an incredible opportunity.
“We ended up crashing the rollout! I never got my name on the invite list, but we got our 15
minutes with Richard Branson. We’re not asking you to invest in the company, we’re if when the
airplane is delivered whether you would like the first few with the Virgin logo on the tail.”
This was a huge moment for the company. Everyone knows Richard Branson and Virgin airlines,
so overnight Boom became much more legitimate in the eyes of investors. Most importantly,
Virgin didn’t have to actually spend any money up front, so it was easy to get the deal approved.
I was actually at the YC Demo Day where Blake first presented Boom to investors
and the reaction was pretty amazing. Everyone loved the idea and couldn’t wait to invest.
None of the specifications of the airplane had been decided yet, after all, the company was
still brand new. But Blake had a clear vision for what would be most important to airlines.
Speed, Safety, and Sustainability. These might seem like vague marketing terms,
but they are actually extremely calculated based on the previous failures of supersonic
development. In order to understand why Blake is so focused on these particular values,
we have to go back to 1969. America had just landed a man on the moon
and the first commercial supersonic airplane was about to take flight.
It was the Concorde and it had a lot in common with Boom’s new aircraft.
On the Concorde, a trip from New York to London took just over three hours and it felt like the
dawn of an entirely new age. Throughout human history, increases in the speed of transport
have had remarkable second order effects. In the 1840s, traveling across the United States
required traveling in a covered wagon. The journey took months and people often died in transit.
But in 1869, the transcontinental railroad shortened that trip to just 83 hours.
America went through a remarkable period of growth as people migrated westward.
And in the 1930s transcontinental airlines began moving Americans across the country in just 20
hours. A few decades later, jet engines cut that time down to just 6 hours and travel exploded.
The jet age affected culture in remarkable ways. The Beatles were able to go on the first world
tour and become an international sensation and Major League Baseball became a national sport
played all over the United States. It’s always hard to predict the effects of faster travel,
but throughout history, great things always happen when we start moving faster.
The Concorde promised to make international travel dramatically more accessible,
but there were a ton of problems, and most of them come back to speed, safety, and sustainability.
Speed was obviously the main selling point of the Concorde. Business travelers
value their time extremely highly and are willing to pay lots of money to save time,
but it’s also just cool to go fast. And celebrities loved how fast the Concorde went:
“It’s always exciting to go supersonic and it’s always exciting to get
to New York before you’ve left.” But traveling at Mach 2 can cause
some real issues. The first of which was heat. The Concorde went so fast that the plane would
heat up substantially. The entire fuselage had to be coated in a highly reflective white paint
in order to deflect as much light as possible. One Concorde was painted blue during a promotion
for Pepsi and wound up only being able to stay at Mach 2 for 20 minutes because of heat build up!
The Concorde was built before computer simulation allowed for engineers to test performance in
virtual environments, so a lot of these issues had to be worked out through painstaking experiments.
But Boom is building their planes using the latest software tools.
The second issue was fuel. You would expect a plane that goes twice as fast to use twice
as much fuel. But the Concorde actually used more than five times as much fuel
as modern commercial airliners. This meant that tickets had to be extremely expensive
to offset the cost of fuel and every trip came with significant carbon emissions.
Boom is leveraging advances in engine design that yield greater fuel efficiency,
which will mean cheaper ticket prices. But they aren’t stopping there. Boom plans to
use fuel made from carbon that was removed from the atmosphere, meaning that supersonic
travel will be carbon neutral from day one. Increased fuel efficiency won’t just make New
York to London trips more affordable though. It will actually open up entirely new routes.
The Concorde was never able to fly across the pacific, but Boom has planned to offer service
from San Francisco to Tokyo since day one. This new route will expand the market for these planes
and give Boom a better chance at success. Blake also thinks about pricing differently
than the executives who ran the Concorde project. He wants to continually bring
prices down until you can get anywhere in the world for just a hundred bucks. But the
Concorde executives were much more focused on short-term profitability. British Airways and
Air France actually performed market research to inform their pricing strategy. People generally
thought of the Concorde as extremely expensive, so they raised prices to match expectations!
This is fine when your customer is a rich business traveler, but if you’re catering to wealthy
people, you need to have a perfect safety record, and safety is what really did the Concorde in.
"News tonight this Tuesday, the first Concorde ever to crash just after takeoff from paris.
113 people are killed, which included everyone on-board."
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Air France Flight 4590 crashed during takeoff and
killed everyone on board. The plane had run over a piece of debris on the runway and ruptured a tire.
It destroyed the Concorde’s reputation and grounded the entire fleet for months.
One year later, the September 11th terrorist attacks crushed the entire airline industry
and forced the Concorde into retirement shortly after.
But Boom is learning from all of this. Airplane safety protocols have advanced
significantly in the past two decades and the problem with the Concorde’s
tires has been thoroughly investigated. Many of the safety issues with the Concorde
came from the fact that the engineers on the project had a goal of delivering a supersonic
plane at essentially any cost. The original budget for the Concorde was 70 million, but the
project wound up costing more than a billion. Engineers had to make lots of compromises to get
the Concorde to work. One of which was the nose of the airplane. Because the plane landed at such
a steep angle, the pilots couldn’t see the runway as they approached. So the entire nose cone of the
plane would tilt down during landing. Boom just installed a camera on the front of the plane.
“There’s a camera toggle button you can hit and it flips over and you get all your flight
controls overlaid on top of what is a virtual window through the nose of the airplane. So
you get better runway visibility that you get with a traditional subsonic cockpit.”
Such a simple solution that significantly reduces complexity.
Another issue that plagued the Concorde was the fact that it required a flight engineer to be
onboard during every flight. Essentially, the plane was so complex that a trained expert had
to sit in the cockpit with the pilots just to ensure everything went smoothly. This created
a ton of extra cost, and even with the flight engineer, most airlines still had to have an
extra Concorde sitting on standby at all times. This was because customers were so demanding that
no airline could afford to frustrate customers with delays if there were maintenance issues.
Boom is building for reliability from day one, and by simplifying the design of the
plane and using software solutions wherever possible, they should be able to avoid many
of the pitfalls that the Concorde faced. Lastly, there’s the issue of noise. The fact
that Blake named his company Boom is pretty funny, since the sonic boom was one of the major issues
with Concorde. Sonic booms are so powerful that they can break windows in houses below
and for that reason, the United States has put a speed limit on aircraft traveling over
the country. But NASA engineers are working on solving the issue of the sonic boom as well.
It’s unlikely that they will ever be able to muffle it entirely, but there’s a good
chance that they could lower the boom from 105 decibels to just 70 decibels. At that volume,
US lawmakers might revisit the speed limit if it means getting from California
to Washington DC in half the time. Strict regulation is just one of many
factors that have led to stagnation in the aerospace industry and prominent investors
like Peter Thiel have been calling for America to address this for years now:
“I often think it's worth looking at quantity not quality and we're not going faster you know
the Concorde was decommissioned in 2003 and if you include low tech airport security mechanisms
we're back to about 1960 type travel speeds today in the US”
Part of the problem with the Concorde was that, ultimately, it was a vanity project
by the UK and French governments. They had amazing engineers working on the technology,
but they never had a strong economic model. But Boom is thinking of the business model from day
one, and they already have signed contracts with airlines. Only 14 Concordes ever saw commercial
service, but United Airlines has already committed to buying 20 planes from Boom.
That’s really solid progress, but Boom has some strong competition.
Subsonic planes are getting faster and more efficient. It’s also possible to have a more
productive flight on a traditional plane now that you can use the WiFi to get some work done,
or sleep in a lie flat seat in first class. There are also other companies working
on developing supersonic planes, like Spike Aerospace and Aerion Supersonic,
although Aerion recently went out of business. But I think Boom’s real competition will come from
outside the traditional airline industry. There are several companies working on planes capable of
vertical takeoff and landing which could change the way we travel, even if everything is still
subsonic. A huge amount of any trip is spent just getting to and from the airport,
and these new VTOL aircraft will make it much easier to get to smaller airports.
Then there’s SpaceX’s point-to-point. Elon Musk thinks he can get passengers from New
York to Tokyo in just 30 minutes using a rocket. This is clearly a long-shot,
but if it works, it would be substantially faster than flying in a supersonic plane.
Lastly, we can’t forget about the exponential growth of the internet. Every year,
internet speeds get faster and more people get connected. Video conferencing just saw a massive
surge in adoption during the pandemic and people are more comfortable doing business remotely now.
Virtual reality is still in its infancy, but Facebook is working hard to make communication
in VR indistinguishable from reality. This is all part of a larger initiative to build
what people are calling a “metaverse”, but that’s a topic for another video.