Blake Scholl’s is a familiar Silicon Valley story. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in computer science, worked at Amazon and Groupon, among others, and in 2014 sold a startup he had developed. An instrument-rated private pilot and flight enthusiast, he used the proceeds to create, with two partners, a new company, which they named Boom Technology. The company does business under a less generic and more dramatic name: Boom Supersonic.
The none-too-modest aim of Boom Supersonic is to design and manufacture a supersonic airliner, which it calls Overture. Early this year, Boom successfully passed Mach 1 with a one-third scale demonstrator called XB-1. Boom boasts that XB-1 is the first privately developed jet to break the sound barrier. (Privately developed rocket planes, like Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne, did so previously.) In its brief supersonic flights, XB-1 also provided a practical demonstration of so-called “boomless cruise.”
