Blake Scholl: Why Plane Speed Stalled, Supersonic Commercial Flight, & Revolutionizing the Engine

Why does it matter? Because the near-death experience that almost ended Boom Supersonic may fund the entire supersonic revolution.

Rolls-Royce walked away. The industry wrote the obituary. Then Boom Supersonic did something no one predicted: being forced to build their own jet engine from scratch accidentally created one of the hottest energy businesses in the AI era. This episode is about what happens when survival instincts produce breakthroughs — and why the constraints that nearly killed a startup ended up making it fundable.

• Boom's supersonic engine, fitted with a generator instead of a fan, deploys 42 megawatts per unit with no water requirement — and tens of gigawatts of data center demand are already in Blake Scholl's inbox • The 52-year US ban on supersonic flight ended June 6th last year, 115 days after Boom broke the sound barrier using a physics argument that convinced the president in one meeting • The transatlantic break-even fare on Overture is $3,500 round trip at Mach 1.7 — business class pricing, not Concorde luxury • New York to San Francisco in 30 minutes, over land, legally, using atmospheric refraction that redirects the sonic boom upward before it ever reaches the ground

Getting dumped by Rolls-Royce accidentally made Boom a data center power company with tens of gigawatts of orders

"It's an incredible money printing business." Scholl is describing something that didn't exist two years ago.

When Rolls-Royce walked away publicly, the startup was declared finished. Scholl calls trying to outsource engine development to a big old company "one of the dumbest things I ever did." So Boom built the engine themselves. Then someone noticed: strip the fan off the front of a supersonic engine core, bolt a generator to the back, pack it into two trailers, and you have 42 megawatts of behind-the-meter power generation that doesn't need water.

That last part is the key. The supersonic engine core runs hot by design — for sustained Mach 1.7 cruise. Hot engines don't need cooling water. In a world where data centers are running out of both power and water, that's a compelling pairing.

"In a bizarre twist of history, the thing that everyone said would kill us... actually turns out to be the thing that makes a supersonic startup financially valuable." Tens of gigawatts of demand in Scholl's inbox. The first engine tests next month, then gets auctioned off. When asked directly whether Elon was interested for Colossus, Scholl's answer — "You should ask Elon" — said enough.

The 52-year supersonic ban ended 115 days after Boom broke the sound barrier, using a physics argument that needed one meeting

Monday, Boom breaks the sound barrier. Scholl tweets. Elon reposts. Scholl flies to DC that night. Tuesday: West Wing invitation. By Thursday: the airplane model is sitting in the Oval Office, where it still sits — "one of the greatest product placements of all time."

115 days later, the executive order was signed. The ban that started in 1973 — the political fallout from Concorde's thunderclap over residential America — ended June 6th last year.

The argument was clean: "He agreed if there's no sonic boom there should be no ban on supersonic flight." If the physics premise of a rule is invalid, the rule should follow. Scholl didn't lobby around the ban. He invalidated its foundation.

Then he locked it in legislatively. The Supersonic Legalization Act passed the House. Vote: unanimous. Senate passage, also unanimous. Congress, it turns out, can move fast when there's no partisan angle and no constituents complaining about sonic booms. The regulatory lesson: don't negotiate with bad rules on their own terms — destroy the premise that created them.

NY to SF by 9:30 a.m. — the sonic boom problem is already solved and over-land supersonic needs no waiver

Leave New York at 9:00 a.m. Land in San Francisco at 9:30 a.m. Over land. Legally. No special exemption.

Boom calls it boomless cruise. The engineers call it mach cutoff. The boom peels off the airplane at normal strength — then makes a U-turn in the atmosphere and never reaches the ground. Natural refraction bends it upward. Result, in Scholl's framing: "It's a sonic nothing."

The ceiling is Mach 1.3 over land — roughly 50% faster than current commercial flight. Over water, where no one's there to hear anything, Overture opens up to full Mach 1.7. The domestic and international profiles split cleanly. Overture doesn't need boomless cruise over oceans because it doesn't need to.

Everyone treated over-land supersonic as a permanently closed door. The physics said otherwise. Manufacturing timelines and FAA certification are now the actual constraints — not acoustics, not law, not public tolerance for noise. Route planners can treat every domestic corridor as viable today.

The transatlantic break-even fare is $3,500 round trip — Concorde was luxury, Overture is competing with business class

Three numbers: Mach 1.7. Three hours. $3,500 round trip. Break even.

Scholl is precise: "Round trip across the Atlantic at Mach 1.7, 3 hours, and the break even fare is about $3,500." That's the floor. United, which holds 130 orders, takes home solid margin on everything above it — "any dollar above that, United's making some good money."

Concorde went zero for three on safe, comfortable, affordable. Overture aims for all three. At $3,500, the addressable market isn't the ultra-wealthy — it's the tens of millions of people who already pay premium fares for transatlantic business class and still land six hours later. The right comp is a lie-flat seat at the front of the cabin, not a Concorde ticket from 1999.

Timeline target: four years. Scholl hedges on the exact date — "it's more important to be fast than to be predictable" — but the commercial logic is already assembled. The regulatory path is clear, the pricing pencils out, and the airlines have already voted with their order books.

RONA optimization hollowed out Boeing — Boom is rebuilding from raw materials the manufacturing capabilities legacy aerospace discarded

Boeing's latest airliner is, in Scholl's words, "a literal carbon fiber copy of their first." That first airplane entered service in 1957. Boeing launched the 787 in 2004. Boom now has interns born after that. "This is insane."

The diagnosis: legacy aerospace financialized its way to irrelevance. Return-on-net-assets philosophy made companies spin out manufacturing capabilities — the "crown jewels" of proprietary process knowledge — for short-term returns. It worked, briefly. Then Boeing couldn't build a plane on time or on spec, and Rolls-Royce couldn't reliably supply an engine to a startup.

Boom's philosophy is the explicit inversion. They manufacture their own engines at scale, "starting from raw materials then going to the parts including the most difficult ones like blades and vanes." The factory — undisclosed location — made its first parts last week. Target: multiple gigawatts per year, 10+ gigawatts to the grid over five years.

The XB1 demonstrator — the aircraft that broke the sound barrier — was built by 50 people. Something the incumbents "would have put thousands of people on." The Goliath in this story isn't blocking the door. It's asleep. RONA optimization is a strategic trap, and Boom is building the proof.

Boom's supersonic engine will be the most tested new jet engine ever built — because data centers are funding the test program

The biggest certification risk for any new aircraft isn't the airframe — it's an unproven engine.

Boom is pre-solving that before the airplane reaches final assembly. The same engine core that will power Overture at Mach 1.7 goes into data center trailers first. It logs thousands of hours at full power, at high temperature — exactly what it faces at cruise altitude — before a passenger ever boards. Scholl names it directly: future travelers will fly "on what will actually be the most tested new jet engine ever made, thanks to being proven on the ground first."

The data centers pay for the test program. Every gigawatt Boom sells to an AI company is a funded reliability trial for the propulsion system that eventually crosses the Atlantic. The cold-start trap that kills new engine programs — you need flight hours to prove reliability, but you can't get flight hours without certification, and you can't get certification without reliability — gets dissolved on the ground, at someone else's expense.

Scholl doesn't oversell it: "There's still many, many hard problems to solve. Success is not guaranteed." But the single most dangerous failure mode is addressed before the plane ever needs to take off.

The real bet isn't supersonic flight — it's that vertical integration compounds in ways outsourcing never can

Everything Blake Scholl describes traces back to one premise: manufacturing knowledge, once accumulated, compounds. Boeing sold that knowledge off for short-term returns and can't easily buy it back. Boom is building it from scratch — turbine blade by turbine blade, test hour by test hour, each funded by data centers before an airplane ever takes off commercially.

That compounding is the moat. Not the aircraft itself, but the industrial capability underneath it.

The supersonic era didn't stall because flight got too hard. It stalled because no one was building.

---

Topics: supersonic aviation, aerospace, hardware startups, energy, data centers, regulation, vertical integration, manufacturing, Boom Supersonic, Blake Scholl