◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek October 12, 202022
and Y Combinator Continuity. Their shared bet is
that software, materials, and engines have advanced
enough over the past 20 years to cancel out most
of the Concorde’s shortcomings. “When you put
a bunch of these improvements together, you get
on the happy side of a tipping point,” Scholl says.
“Supersonic no longer has to be only available to a
tiny number of people on a small number of routes.”
Scholl, who’s from Cincinnati, is a computer sci-
ence graduate, amateur pilot, and longtime avia-
tion buff, but the early parts of his career don’t arc
toward aerospace. He previously worked on adver-
tising and social networking technology at Amazon
.com Inc. and founded a mobile tech startup called
Kima Labs, which was acquired by Groupon Inc.
Most people don’t think of going from the business
of online coupons to bending metal, but Scholl fol-
lowed his curiosity after leaving Groupon in 2014.
Then in his mid-30s, he wondered why no one
had tried to build a commercial supersonic aircraft
in decades. He spent weeks researching the field,
thinking he would stumble upon obvious answers
that would talk him out of starting something like
Boom. He took an airplane design class. He studied
physics via Khan Academy. He cold-called people
in the industry. As time went on, Scholl found him-
self only more encouraged, and he began compil-
ing a spreadsheet model of the specs he wanted for
a plane. He showed it to a Stanford professor, who,
instead of laughing him out of the room, told Scholl
many of the technical assumptions were too conser-
vative. He was encouraged to keep going.
Over the next year, Scholl made his trips to
Mojave and marched through his LinkedIn con-
tacts looking for anyone who knew someone at a
place like SpaceX or NASA or Lockheed Martin.
Slowly, he began assembling a list of smart peo-
ple to talk to and good people to hire. “When I
told people I was building a supersonic jet, their
first question was ‘Are you crazy?’ But their sec-
ond question was ‘How can I help?’ ” Scholl says.
By 2015 he’d hired about a dozen people and set
them up in singer John Denver’s old hangar at the
Centennial Airport in Colorado, which caters to pri-
vate planes. Scholl had tapped deep into his volu-
minous stores of enthusiasm to talk a small team of
people into believing they could build a supersonic
plane from these humble digs. Brimming with opti-
mism, he expected Boom to build and fly its first
jet by late 2017. Aren’t dreams wonderful things?
Their original plan for the plane has held true
today. It would be built out of carbon fiber instead
of aluminum, making it lighter and faster than an
aircraft like the Concorde. It would run on read-
ily available engines, which are now much morefuel-efficient than what the Concorde’s design-
ers could access. And Boom would use modern
software to perform millions of simulations on its
designs instead of trying new approaches bit by bit
in wind tunnels. “The Concorde did a dozen wind
tunnel tests,” Scholl says. “It would take six months
and millions of dollars for each test. Today we test
designs in simulations that take minutes to hours.”
Each engineering choice came with knock-on
benefits. Designers of planes, for example, don’t
like straight lines. They want to taper them into
perfectly aerodynamic works of art. It’s much
easier to achieve these sultry shapes with car-
bon fiber that can be molded, and then hardened
in an oven, than it is with aluminum, which pre-
fers to remain in a linear form. The more efficient
engines will save on fuel costs and allow Boom to
fly much longer routes than the Concorde. Modern
software and electronics help, too. A supersonic
plane needs to be two airplanes at once: one that’s
maneuverable at low speeds for takeoffs and land-
ings, and another that’s an unleashed beast, trav-
eling as fast as it can in a straight line while using
the least amount of fuel possible.
To deal with this split personality, the Concorde
had a heavy, complicated movable nose cone that
would tilt down so pilots could see the runway,
and then raise up in the air for speed. Boom’s
planes have the same angled, pointy nose, which
shapes the air into a low-pressure vortex ideal▼ Boom’s chief
test pilot, Bill “Doc”
Shoemaker, operates
a simulator in the
company’s hangar
outside Denver● Amount raised by
Boom Technology$160m