Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl wants to bring back flights that break the sound barrier. Now he just needs to figure out whether airlines and travelers will buy in.
When the Concorde was grounded in 2003, done in by strained economics and a fiery crash on a Paris runway, it appeared to be the end of the line for supersonic travel. Nothing emerged to replace it. In fact, the speed of air travel moved in the opposite direction, with many routes getting slower in recent years as congestion and air-traffic control inefficiencies jammed up the skies.
A former Amazon software engineer named Blake Scholl founded a company to change this. A decade ago, he launched Boom Supersonic, betting that his Denver-based startup could tap in to the allure of ultrafast travel—a desire that has never quite been extinguished despite the financial and practical challenges that ended the Concorde’s nearly 30-year run. Scholl sees a world where round-trip trans-Atlantic business journeys happen in a single day.
“The thinking has been, ‘Supersonic flight would obviously be great, but nobody is doing it so therefore it must be impossible,’ ” the 44-year-old chief executive said during a recent interview. “Not true.”
Excerpt from WSJ
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