Boom Supersonic's big idea for a small impact on the planet
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part 2 of my exclusive interview with Blake Scholl, CEO and founder of Denver-based Boom Supersonic. His Overture aircraft aims to be the first supersonic passenger jet since Concorde was grounded in 2003. The Anglo-French supersonic aircraft was incredibly noisy and thirsty. Overture will be neither, he believes.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. |
| 0:04.9 | It's Tuesday the 13th of January. |
| 0:08.1 | Day two of our Supersonic Week on the podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | My guest again today is Blake Shaw. |
| 0:16.2 | He is the founder and chief executive of Boom Supersonic, whose overture aircraft is hoped to be flying by the end of this decade. |
| 0:29.3 | In today's podcast, we're talking about speed and the impact that the jet will have on the planet. |
| 0:36.0 | But first, a snapshot of what overture should be able to achieve. |
| 0:42.1 | If you leave London and you fly to New York, that's going to be about three and a half hours. |
| 0:46.2 | So you could have breakfast in London, get to New York, actually have breakfast in New York, |
| 0:50.5 | fly to San Francisco, have breakfast in San Francisco. |
| 0:53.6 | And in fact, if you just keep flying west, |
| 0:55.6 | you can have nothing but breakfast. |
| 0:57.3 | Well, let's talk about speed. |
| 0:59.2 | Concord was at Mac 2.2. |
| 1:01.7 | You are going to be at 1.7. |
| 1:04.1 | That sounds not much. |
| 1:05.7 | Like, progress, we'd expect Mac 5 at least. |
| 1:08.3 | Yeah, well, Concord was originally targeted at 2.2. |
| 1:11.6 | They actually settled on 2.02. |
| 1:13.9 | And we all originally targeted 2.2 as well. |
| 1:17.6 | And what we found was, as we optimized the airplane, it was better to target 1.7 for the first iteration. |
| 1:24.2 | And the reason was actually noise. |
... |
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