Notes for TWiST ep.638 — Blake Scholl, CEO of Boom, resurrects the dream of the supersonic passenger airplane

Blake Scholl, Boom

What happens when you are pissed you couldn’t fly on the Concorde and you happen to be Blake Scholl, a successful serial entrepreneur and an aviation fanatic? You build your own damn supersonic plane!

Today on ThisWeekinStartup host Jason Calacanis welcomes Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Technology about his supersonic passenger airplane scheduled to hit the sky in 2017.

Boom is the “Silicon Valley meet Airplanes” company making extensive use of common startup practices like prototyping and moving fast with lots of iterations.

His vision: living in a world where you can get anywhere in the world in 5 hours with 100 bucks.

The lessons he learnt along the way: as adults, we can learn more than we think; audacious ideas are as hard to execute as shittier ones; actually, passion and caring will push yourself through the thick and the thin.

Fasten your seat belts and be ready to pick up the story of commercial supersonic flight where the Concorde left off: its death is the beginning of our story.

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The death of Concorde

• In 2013 a Concorde blew up and crashed right after take off in Paris
• It had nothing to do with it being supersonic, it could have happened to any other plane
• It was caused by a series of factors: a piece of debris on the airway that punctured the wing, it took off on the wrong airway, it was over max weight
• It went back to service after that accident for a few months and it was finally decommissioned the same year
• The death of supersonic flight happened in the 70ies
• It never took over and change the world like the jet age did because we rushed into, the Concorde was built before it was possible to do it economically
• A ticket on the Concorde cost 20 grands and it had 100 seats on the airplane, can’t find enough people to pay as much twice a day to get somewhere on very many routes
• Result: too expensive, no economy of scale, only 20 planes ever built
• Concordes are now sitting in museums
• Richard Branson tried to actually buy the fleet when Air France and British Airways shut them down but they didn’t let him

Blake Scholl

• Blake Scholl is bringing the supersonic flight back
• Before Boom, he sold Kima Labs, a mobile e-commerce tech company to Groupon and stayed there for a couple of years
• He wanted to work on another startup on something he was super passionate and cared so much about because passion and caring is what keeps you going through thick and thin (his belief)
• He made a list of things that would have been cool if they worked and a supersonic airplane was on the top of the list
• He was pissed he couldn’t get to fly at Mach 2 speed on the Concorde and since nobody seemed to do it, he took the matter in his own hands and he set out to build the plane himself
• The challenge is to succeed where Concorde failed
• It failed because it was too expensive to build, run and maintain and too expensive for most people (fuel costs as well)
• Now we have better technology, better aerodynamics, software optimized aerodynamics, better engines, lighter materials
• “If you could improve Concorde fuel economy just by about 30%, then you can do a supersonic fee for the same fuel that a lay bed in first class would take — that’s what makes if feasible”
• The fuel economy has been improved by more than 30% thanks to the design, the aerodynamics, engines and materials making it a viable enterprise
• Concorde was aluminum-made, not the best material to build an airplane around
• With it you can’t give the plane the aerodynamic-optimized shape you want and at high speed (over Mach 2), the attrition with air makes it so hot it gets softer and it loses some of its structure properties
• Carbon fiber, which will be used by Boom airplanes, is molded in any shape you want so you can use software to design and optimize shape and then use carbon fiber to realize it — with the right resin it can be stronger than aluminum and resist at higher temperatures
• Their plane is fatter in the front and skinnier in the back where the wings stick out due to a principle called areo ruling that makes a huge difference in aerodynamics efficiency when you are supersonic
• You won’t get reclining seats (that’s the trade-off) but you get there twice as fast and you’ll just sleep in a real bed when you get there
• The company was founded in September 2014 and was in stealth mode up until lately when it broke the news after the Virgin Group made public their intention of ordering 10 Boom airplanes

The speed it will fly at

• Mach 1 is the speed of sound, most airplanes today speed at 85% of the speed of sound (about 500 miles per hour, the speed of sound is 768 mph)
• The Concorde flew at Mach 2, Boom will fly at Mach 2.2 1400–1500 miles per hour
• It will take 3 and half hours to get from New York to London

Sonic boom

• Eventually the supersonic boom will be much quieter, just like a thump, the technology for that already exists
• Their airplane is designed to be 100 times quieter than the Concorde
• There is a speed limit on the US skies, planes can’t go supersonic overland, no matter how quiet or loud the supersonic boom
• They don’t count on regulatory changes so their plane will just go supersonic over water
• Hopefully regulations will change when people will realize it’s a stupid ban and supersonic commercial flights will connect New York to LA or to SF

Costs and orders

• He likes to say they can build the whole company and get to break even for less money that Uber raises in a round
• They are building a much cheaper (1/3 scale by length, 1/9 by volume, just 2 seats, pilot and passenger), smaller prototype of the final thing and it will fly by the end of the next year — it will go as fast
• They are already taking orders
• 25 airplanes on L.O.I. (Letter Of Intent), not binding yet and no deposit yet
• Virgin Group ordered 10
• A plane will cost 200 millions

Engine

• The prototype will fly with an off-the-shelves General Electric engine which NASA has already flown to Mach 2.5 and which was used by some early Learjet models
• For the production airplane carrying 40 people, they will use an adaptation of a current commercial engine
• If the engine didn’t exist, the whole company wouldn’t be possible

Ticket cost

• Out of the gate it will cost like a business class ticket, $5000 round trip from New York to London
• Their goal is to make it cheaper so everybody will be able to afford a ticket

Boom Airlines

• They are building the planes and selling them. Could they just operate their own airline company?
• Selling airplanes allow to make an order book which is key for engine companies to be willing to work with you, to raise capital and finance the whole venture
• If he was selling the airplanes to himself, it would be harder to finance

ETA

• The launch of their first production plane hasn’t yet been scheduled, they wait to fly the prototype first

How the planes are built

• They are built with carbon fiber, just a commodity nowadays
• They order and buy pieces of the airplanes from a carbon fiber manufacture company and they fit the pieces together by themselves
• The first carbon-fiber big, commercial airplane made was the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, they spent billions to prove it was safe

Autonomous airplanes

• Nowadays planes can fly on autopilot 99% of the flight time, some can even land on their own
• Not having a pilot is the future of flight, even if having or not having a pilot on a commercial flight doesn’t have such a big economical impact (being it spread over hundreds of people on the flight)
• Pilots’ creativity occasionally makes a difference, like the pilot who landed on the Hudson in New York
• It’s hard to build an AI that can react properly to the thousand of edge cases (like landing on the closest river if both of the engines are out) and you have to make sure to cover them all
• It could save more lives

Safety of mass commercial flying

• Last year 0 people died in an airplane accident world wide
• There were 2 incidents but they weren’t accidents
• One took place when a depressed German Wings pilot decided to crash its plane on the Alps, the other when either Ukranian government forces or Ukrainian rebels shot down a Malaysia flight over the sky of Ukraine (everybody died in both instances)
• When flying smaller planes where safety checklists aren’t enforced, commercial pilots make more mistakes

Checklists

• That’s why checklists are important, they keep you accountable
• “The Checklist manifesto” is the Audible book of the day
• On a commercial flight, one pilot typically reads the checklist while the other does it, much likely to miss steps, making flying safer

Funds raised

• Before YC they raised a couple of millions, after YC they are raising more
• The prototype will cost in the 10–20 million dollars range

Learning as adults

• Most people underestimate as adults how much they can learn, how quickly they can get deep
• He spent 6 months teaching himself aerospace engineering fundamentals, reading texts books, doing exercises, asking smart people if he was right and how he could solve the problem of viable commercial supersonic flights
• People were very kind with their time when they knew he was working on such a project
• He learnt from smart people in the industry, he got to know them and see who would be a good hire
• He wanted to hire the best so he would ask anybody who they would want to come to work on this project and keep track of the names that were coming up again and again

Hiring

• About a year ago he flew half of dozen of the best candidates he could find to hire the first 2 people in the company
• They spent 2 days in a room dissecting the plans for the plane and the company
• After that he knew who he wanted to work with and hired his Chief Engineer and his CTO
• People who wants to build fast planes should work at Boom

His vision

• He wants to live in a world where you can get anywhere in the world in 5 hours with 100 bucks (“it’s decade long mission”)

Electric airplanes

• The density of electric batteries is the problem
• Jet fuel vs batteries is at a factor of 60
• It doubles every ten years, so it will take many years for batteries to equal jet fuel efficiency, unless something innovative comes out
• We need a new energy system (fusion/nuclear reaction?) for plane tickets to get in the 100 dollars range to fly fast anywhere in the world

Audacious startups aren’t harder

• He now thinks that building an incredibly audacious startup isn’t much harder than any other startup, no direct proportion between audaciousness and increased difficulty in execution
• Building Boom has felt as hard as building his previous mobile company
• Problems sometimes are not as hard as we think they are

Baby Boom

• “Baby Boom” is the working name of their first plane
• They’ll come up with an official name later

“Boom miles”

• Jason suggests the creation of “Boom miles” for pre-order, 1 dollar 1 mile
• He would buy 10,000 Boom miles for $10k he will be later able to spend flying around once the planes are operational

YC Demo Day

• They brought their engine at YC Demo Day (Jason wasn’t there cause he wasn’t invited)
• It got them lots of attention and he’s confident they will succeed at raising enough to build the prototype and keep their dream of accessible supersonic flight going

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