Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

It's Thursday the 15th of January, which means day four in our Super Sonic series that is

speeding you to the end of the week. I'm back talking to Blake Scholl. He is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a company that

is developing the overture supersonic jet at their headquarters in Denver, Colorado, which is where I

went to see Blake and we talk about the tyranny of distance.

The longer the flight, the more valuable it is to speed up.

New York London is obvious.

It's the most traveled business route in the planet.

That was the one route where Concord actually was profitable.

But there were over 600 where this makes sense.

Think of the kangaroo route.

Think about London,

Sydney. I mean, today, you can't even do it nonstop. Quantus is working on that. And it's something

like 23 hours. It's just miserable. With overture, you'll need to stop for gas a couple times,

but it'll be more like 13 or 14, which is still inhumanly long, but that's 10 hours better, right? So also just, you know, think anything across the Atlantic, think anything across the Pacific, across the continental U.S., you'll be 50% faster. If you want to go Dubai, London, that's going to be a great route. You'll fly that over Europe without making a sonic boom. There's many, many routes. The longer it is, the more valuable it is. But range, as it was for Concord, is still going to be a problem. Concord used sometimes to have to refueling Shannon in Ireland on its way from London to Barbados, because it couldn't get there on a single tank of fuel. Yeah, and so version one will have some refueling, too. We've got more range than Concord did on day one.

But ultimately, there's going to be a whole family of airplanes. They're going to be smaller ones. They're going to be larger ones. They'll be shorter range ones, longer range. Which is the same way Airbus and Boeing make a whole family of airplanes today. We're going to make a whole family of supersonic airplanes. Over True 1 is the right place to start. but there are going to be more models.

There'll be longer range models.

They'll be less expensive models.

I think over the next roughly two decades, we're going to see subsonic get replaced with supersonic and a whole family of airplanes. And that's going to create so much demand. And yet, as far as I know it, in Greensboro, North Carolina, you're only going to be able to make 33 a year. Still not keeping up with demand. Well, that's the very first assembly line. We have plans to build as many as three, which will get to 100 per year. And, of course, we can always tool up and build more. I do think we're going to need to build a lot of these airplanes. Across in Seattle, you have Boeing. Across into news, you have Airbus.

Why should boom here in Denver be doing something different from those guys?

I think we have a duopoly today, and we get duopoly kinds of results.

So for every product that Boeing makes, there's an exact copy from Airbus.

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