Opinion | Blake Scholl wants you to come fly with him — a lot faster than you can now

Eighteen years and 10 months. Give or take.

That is how long it is been since the Concorde’s swan song, travelling at twice the speed of sound from JFK airport in New York City to London’s Heathrow. Carrying a manifest that included names such as diva Joan Collins, model Christie Brinkley and even Sting, it was the last gasp for an aircraft once a symbol of both luxury and dexterity, which had to cease because of financial pressures. One that bore the tag line “Arrive Before You Leave.”

Since its first transcontinental crossing in 1976, from D.C. to Paris, it had burgeoned to destinations ranging from Barbados to Bahrain, and counted among its passengers everyone from Diana, Princess of Wales, to Andy Warhol. Socialites galore. Masters of the universe. Iranian caviar to spare and a place to hang one’s mink: just that kind of floating nirvana during the so-called Jet Age. Where, as Cindy Crawford once recalled, she fell asleep before takeoff only to wake up an hour later to find Mick Jagger sitting next to her.

All just part of the dreamscape that Blake Scholl roused in me when I went to hear his talk the other week here in Toronto at the Collision Conference — the so called “Olympics of Tech,” which drew close to 35,000 attendees from all over the world for smart talk and frenzied networking. If Scholl, the intrepid CEO of Boom Supersonic, has his way, we might finally get a sequel to the Concorde, at least when it comes to speed.

“In aviation, not only have we not gone faster, we’ve actually gone slower” was his central refrain during an address held in a cavernous room at Exhibition Place, brows lifting from attendees, many of whom had battled airport Darwinism to get to Toronto. In this, the summer of flight plan conundrums — when a terror of travel has set in across continents — what this big dreamer from Denver, Colo., seemed to be offering was akin to water in the desert.

But, hey, it’s not a mirage. Boom Supersonic recently rolled out an honest-to-goodness, IRL, demonstrator aircraft, the XB1, and a plane called the Overture, which goes into production next year and will cut flight times in half, compared to many commercial jets today.

Or as Scholl put it, “Amsterdam, four and a half hours from Toronto; New York, three and a half hours from London; Tokyo, four and a half from Seattle.”

As the founder of what he calls the first private supersonic builder — one that some might remember from a recent “60 Minutes” profile — Scholl expects to have planes in the air by 2029. (A reason to hang on.) As a start-up, he has $14 billion in preorders, with United Airlines ordering 15 Overture planes just last year with an option to buy 35 more. (To put that in perspective, only 14 Concordes were ever in service.) He is thinking hundreds, if not thousands, of planes, all with 100 per cent sustainable aviation fuels and “all business class supersonic 65-seat airplanes.”

I needed to know more — much more! — so I promptly caught up with Scholl after his talk. How was your flight here? I asked. Small talk that seemed more than apropos, given the context.

“Too slow,” came back Scholl, who used to be a programmer for Amazon and looks like one — and/or like the nice dad at the swim meet.

Growing up in Ohio, he told me — not far from where the Wright Brothers designed the first plane, incidentally — there was a bit of foreshadowing for his future ventures. His parents took him, when he was about six or seven months, to the local airport, during which time he also had a little Fisher-Price airplane. Apparently this was “the first time I made a connection between a toy thing and a real thing,” Scholl said.

As a kid, he dreamed of airplanes and often drew pictures of airplanes, though he never imagined a career in aerospace. For one main reason, he said, looking back: “We stopped doing inspiring things in the late 1960s (when things like Concorde and 747 came to be). And as an ambitious young person, who wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible, I went to work in tech.”

An interest in flight never left him, however. In his 20s, he set a goal to fly a supersonic and even “put a Google alert to find out when I could.” The time, it never arrived. “Where is the airplane that is going to pick up where the Concorde left off?” he wondered, the biggest hitch with the Concorde being that it cost too much. “I was 22 when it shut down. I didn’t have $20,000 (in today’s money) for a joy ride.”

Fast forward to eight years ago — Scholl had had a couple of startups by then, the first of which he sold to Groupon — and his early obsession swelled again. “There’s nothing like working on internet coupons that made me want to work on something that would matter to the world,” he said laughing.

“So, I thought, OK. I don’t know why supersonic jets are not happening, but I will research. And what I found was a space no entrepreneur had looked at seriously, recently — arguably, never.” The Concorde, like Apollo 11, was a byproduct of the Cold War.

“What I found, too, was a bunch of stale conventional wisdom” — the kind that he thought needed to be turned on its head. He started reading, took an airplane design class, consulted a professor at Stanford, set forth on an ambitious hiring spree, began working with Rolls-Royce and others on engines. His mission kept growing, ever expanding.

What does it actually feel like to be flying at that speed? One had to wonder.

“Turns out it is entirely uneventful. Literally, passengers will not notice when they cross the sound barrier,” Scholl said, speaking form his own experience after doing a test a few weeks ago. “If anything, they will notice the view outside the window is very different. They will see the curvature of the earth. And because weather is generally a lower-atmosphere situation, Overture actually flies above the weather as most jetliners do today.”

Scholl is confident that the market bends to what he is building, in the same way that the Tesla started off as a car for a small number of people, but the cost profile went down as demand expanded.

“I don’t know anyone who wants to spend more time on airplanes,” he added, leaving with this crisp sign-off: “Only seven more years to welcome you all aboard.”

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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