Blake Scholl, head of Boom Supersonic, is nothing if not an optimist. In fact, people with less faith in the future than he has might think he’s a bit, well, out there with his dream of picking up where the Concorde left off.
Or, rather, his dream of doing supersonic right, which definitely is not to build a $12,000-per-ticket luxury round trip as the Concorde did. “That’s not travel, that’s like a thing you might hope to do once in a lifetime,” he told The Independent (UK) “Versus where we want to get, which is anywhere in the world in four hours for 100 bucks.”
He admits that “It’s going to take us time to get there. “Where do we want to be in a decade or two? And what’s possible at that time scale?’ Then you work backwards and say, ‘How do we get there?’.” So far, his company has built a one-third scale working prototype of a supersonic plane, the XB1, unveiled last October.
Scholl’s timetable: Fly the XB1 this year. Open a U.S. factory next year. Build Overture, a commercial version of the XB1, in 2023, and have it in service by 2026. How’s that for optimism?
