Beyond Concorde: One man’s quest to bring back supersonic travel becomes reality

When British Airways retired its Concorde fleet in 2003, few imagined that would be the demise of supersonic passenger travel for the foreseeable future. However, one man refused to accept it and has been striving to make his dream a reality since 2014, when he founded U.S. supersonic aircraft manufacturer Boom.

Blake Scholl’s vision to restore supersonic travel and make it both commercially viable and luxurious has been regarded by many as pie in the sky. However, his critics have been eating their words as the Boom’s demonstrator aircraft went supersonic four times in January 2025 to prove his concept.

Blake has always been interested in aviation and earned his private pilot’s license in 2008. However, his early career began as a software engineer with Amazon, eventually selling a small company to Groupon followed by multiple leadership roles with Groupon. He was inspired to start Boom after seeing Concorde in a museum and wondering why aviation had taken such a step backward with no contenders to replace the iconic aircraft. General wisdom said that supersonic travel was no longer financially viable, but Blake refused to accept that modern technology could not be applied to overcome the issues.

Blake decided to educate himself and “bought every textbook I could find, I took remedial calculus and physics classes along with an aeronautical design class. I started building a spreadsheet model of the airplane and the market.” This led him to believe that you could develop existing Boeing 787 technology and apply it to supersonic travel.

Using a carbon composite airframe and making it long and thin, you would need to put in twice as many engines. The aircraft should then be able to go twice as fast and reduce the cost of flying supersonic by about three-quarters, which was the major problem with Concorde.

Confident he had found a way forward, in 2014 he founded Boom.

Blake’s vision includes keeping pricing broadly in line with existing business class fares rather than Concorde, which was priced at first class levels “for rockstars and royalty”, beyond the reach of most people.

He expects the price for New York to London to be around $3,500 per ticket to break even, giving an expected fare of around $5,000. There are also plans for future models of their aircraft, Overture, to bring costs down even lower and be within reach of the average traveler.

He is also focused on ensuring that the onboard experience is as comfortable as possible, compared to Concorde’s seats which were more like something from a low-cost airline. Most airline manufacturers outsource their seating, but Boom is keen to keep this in-house and has a small team working on the designs.

Due to the shorter flights, there are no plans to include flatbeds, keeping costs and the aircraft’s weight down. With 64 seats, there is a dedicated baggage space for every seat so you don’t need to worry about boarding late and not finding room.

For now, Blake is keeping tight-lipped about the exact designs but promises something unexpected to wow customers. Passengers will also enjoy views of the earth from the edge of space as Boom will cruise and climb like Concorde up to an altitude of around 60,000ft. 

Overture will still be fuel intensive like Concorde, needing around double the fuel of conventional aircraft, but that just intensifies Boom’s desire to make aviation more sustainable. Most modern aircraft can only use around 50% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) whereas Overture will be built to run on 100% SAF.

Currently, SAF is too expensive and in too short supply to be viable for mass supply. However, Blake believes that Boom may help increase the supply of SAF as they can support the additional cost due to passengers being willing to pay a premium for a supersonic flight. 

Blake has faced numerous setbacks along the way, such as finding out that the required airframe was 2000 lbs overweight when they were already halfway through building it. Each time under his leadership, the Boom team kept going until they found the solution. All the trials and tribulations finally felt worth it when Boom went supersonic for the first time. Blake says “I was watching the live stream and we watched the Mach number tick over to more than one, which was one of the greatest moments in my life.”  Not content with achieving what many people believed was impossible to bring back commercial supersonic flight, Blake is even more ambitious and plans to train to fly their supersonic aircraft. 

Part of the commercial viability of Boom is down to its “Boomless” technology. While Concorde created a supersonic boom that limited its supersonic travel to being over water, Boom has found a solution to the issue.

In the six times they broke the sound barrier recently, the demonstrator did not create a single supersonic boom. Overture’s autopilot will continuously optimize speed for Boomless Cruise based on atmospheric conditions. Boomless Cruise is possible at speeds up to Mach 1.3, with typical speed between Mach 1.1 and 1.2. Once over the water where the sonic boom is not an issue, speeds of Mach 1.7 will be achieved.

With the Boomless Cruise, speeds are 40-50% faster than conventional airliners, which means a flight from New York to Los Angeles can be up to 90 minutes shorter. With a flight time of around 4 hours and the time difference, you can arrive only an hour after departure, local time. The longest the aircraft can fly continuously is around 4250nm, equivalent to around nine hours flying time at conventional speeds. However, longer flights such as Australia would be possible with a refueling stop, similar to how airlines operate today. It is hoped that the future generation of the aircraft will have an even longer range. 

Boom is working on a fairly short timeframe for delivering aircraft that Blake believes will carry fare-paying passengers within the next five years, with 2029 being the expected launch date. Production on the first aircraft will start in around 18 months with the first test flight expected in 2028.

The aircraft manufacturer already has 130 orders and pre-orders from multiple airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Air. It is interesting that the original operators of Concorde, Air France and British Airways, have not yet formally expressed an interest. Still, Blake is confident that once the concept is proven with firm orders, most major airlines will have to offer supersonic travel to compete. 

While the concept of supersonic aircraft may seem like a hugely costly endeavor, Blake believes in keeping team sizes small for both working together efficiently and keeping costs low. Due to this method of working, he believes that the company will break even by 2030, which is impressive so soon after the commercial launch of the aircraft.

The recent supersonic flights not only proved Blake’s critics wrong, but also culminated many years of hard work to make his long-held dream take flight. Blake Scholl’s unwavering vision and desire to do things differently may lead to Boom being as revolutionary to aircraft as Apple was to mobile phones. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com