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.
