487: Blake Scholl—Making Supersonic Travel Real
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe
4.9 • 40.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 76 minutes
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Summary
Mike Rowe sits down with Blake Scholl, the former Amazon software engineer turned aerospace entrepreneur who walked away from Silicon Valley to revive supersonic passenger travel.
As the founder of Boom Supersonic, Blake explains the century-long pursuit of faster flight. From the Cold War race to break the sound barrier to the rise—and fall—of the Concorde, Blake explains why supersonic travel disappeared just as it seemed destined to change aviation forever. He also shares how Boom Supersonic is working to make high-speed passenger flight practical again, and what it will take to shrink a 12-hour flight into just a few hours.
Along the way, Mike and Blake discuss innovation, risk, engineering breakthroughs, and why some people refuse to accept that getting somewhere faster is a problem already solved.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey guys, Mike Roe here. This is the way I heard it. And today we are making supersonic travel |
| 0:09.9 | real, or at least talking to the guy who has dedicated a big chunk of his life to making that |
| 0:15.8 | possible. I like the way it sounds, Chuck. I like the idea of flying from New York to San Francisco. |
| 0:24.1 | I like the idea of leaving at 9 in the morning and getting there at 9.30 local time. |
| 0:29.3 | I like that a lot. |
| 0:30.9 | Yeah, that would be great. |
| 0:31.9 | Three and a half hours. |
| 0:32.9 | That would be awesome. |
| 0:34.9 | Blake, what do we decide? |
| 0:36.9 | It's shoal, even though he spells it like school. No, no, it's 102L, S-C-H-O-L-L. Shull. Well, you know, what if we got it wrong, it serves him right. It's got a funny name. But man, with a big brain. And what a nice guy. Super. He's on such a mission. It's such a big swing. |
| 0:54.6 | And he's got so many reasons to feel optimistic because he really just, he asked himself |
| 1:00.7 | a really simple question this guy did back in whatever it was 14 years ago. |
| 1:06.5 | It just occurs to him that, you know, planes haven't really gone any faster. |
| 1:11.4 | No. |
| 1:18.4 | Then they got in, what, I guess, 2003 or so, we just, it's like we just said, okay, that's fast enough. |
| 1:19.2 | Yeah. |
| 1:19.8 | And, you know, never mind the Concord. |
| 1:22.4 | Those sonic booms were annoying. |
| 1:24.4 | They were outlawed. |
| 1:25.8 | We just came to accept the fact that this was as good as it gets. |
| 1:29.4 | Right. And what he has done that's so amazing, I think, or at least he's figured it out, |
| 1:34.3 | is that he's able to go supersonic without the supersonic boom. Yeah. And so because of that, |
... |
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