XB-1 and Overture: breaking barriers in air travel innovation
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Welcome to today's episode of Lexicon. I'm Christopher McFadden, contributing writer for Interesting Engineering. Today we sit down with Blake Skoll, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, and Nick Scherica, XD1 chief flight test engineer, to explore how they're bringing supersonic passenger travel back to the skies. From the groundbreaking XB-1 Demonstrator to the Overture Airliner, Boom is blending innovation and sustainability to make faster, more efficient air travel accessible again.

Join us as we examine the challenges, lessons, and breakthroughs shaping the future of supersonic aviation. But before getting into today's episode, make sure to check out our latest merch at Interesting Engineering Shop. Engineer your style with our t-shirts, mugs, and discover new products. Now let's continue with today's episode. Hey Blake and Nick, thanks for joining us. How are you today?

Doing fantastic. How about yourself? Yes, very well. Thank you. Likewise. Glad to be here. All right. Good. For our audience's benefit, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourselves? I guess, Blake, you can start. Yeah. I'm Blake Scholl, founder, CEO, chief troublemaker at Boom Supersonic. So 10 years ago, this company was me and a spreadsheet and a dream in my basement.

And how long does it take to build a supersonic jet? Apparently about a decade. And as we sort of chat here today, we are about a week away, sorry, about a month away from busting the sound barrier for the first time, which will be the first time any independently developed supersonic jet has done that. So it's a big, big year for Boom.

And I guess another thing that's been interesting to share about myself is I had very little background in aviation before it started. Boom. I was a software engineer by training. I had spent a lot of time in the tech world and my, my cred in aviation on day one was I had my pilot's license. And, but I've been fortunate to hire a whole bunch of great people like Nick and many others who have, you know, helped me kind of learn a new domain and, and, you know, come up to speed metaphorically and seemingly literally.

Fantastic. Yourself, Nick? Yeah. So Nick Shereka, I'm the chief flight test engineer here at Boom. I was an early employee. So in the first 15 hires or so way back in 2016, and I was hired initially just because I had a lot of rapid prototyping experience in experimental airplanes.

The first hat that I wore was did a lot of the clean sheets of subsystem design for XP one, and I've kind of gravitated to other roles within the company, which has me now in a happy spot leading our testing efforts on that supersonic platform. So yeah, leading the charge to make that first sonic boom.

Fantastic. Great stuff. On to our first question then. Since the earlier time of Concorde, which being British, I take very personally, what key factors have held back supersonic passenger travel since then? Yeah, it's basically we haven't had the intersection of technology and market. Concorde was, you know,

a marvelous technical accomplishment in many ways so far ahead of its time, but was just unaffordable to passengers. And I think, you know, a $20,000 ticket and a hundred not very comfortable seats, especially with 1960s, 1970s kind of travel demand, it just doesn't hunt. And since then, two things have happened. One is we've had this massive growth in the amount of international travel that happens. The world has gotten far more global.

So the demand for travel has gone up. And on the other hand, we've just massively improved the technology for airplanes. We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber. We've gone from designing on drafting paper and wind tunnels to having really advanced computer simulation and optimization techniques. We've improved the architecture of jet engines. And all of that now sort of lets us get to a point where supersonic flight can be done remotely.

for about the same price that people pay in business class today. And what that means is that the market's finally ready with technology that's proven. So imagine being able to cross the Atlantic in three and a half hours and coming home the same day and be able to do it for what people are already paying business. And so that's the breakthrough here.

Yeah. That's the critical thing, isn't it? It's the cost really more than the safety of Concorde that ended it. Right? Am I understanding correctly? I think the, uh, in my view, Concorde was really stillborn. Right. And it was established by a treaty in 1962 between France and Britain. Um,

And, and, and nobody thought really hard about economics. Uh, you know, the, the, this was, this was, you know, in the cold war is at the same time America's doing the Apollo program. The, uh, this, the Soviets are doing the TU one 44. There, there was an American competitor to Concord that, that never, never really left the drawing board. And,

And nobody, everyone was competing for national prestige and nobody was thinking about practical economics. And so they did, just like Apollo, they did things for technically impressive. There was a bridge nowhere economically. Yeah. So with your X1B test program, what advantages does it have from past supersonic projects like Concorde?

Yeah, I mean, I'll take a swing at this and Nick should add to it. But the remarkable thing that I think surprises most people about XB1 and the Overture airliners, we actually didn't invent anything. We are using technologies that were invented and proven elsewhere, like carbon fiber composites and all that's on the 787 and the A350.

Um, you know, digital stability augmentation that's been on a whole bunch of airplanes, um, uh, computationally optimized aerodynamics, you know, that's, that's been the state of the art for a couple of decades now. Um, but what we are doing is, is basically proving to the world that all of that technology out there that it's been invented elsewhere can be brought together in service of a supersonic jet that is efficient enough, uh, to carry passengers at reasonable fares. And, um,

and safe enough to put a human in. And that's what we're doing on XB-1. And then we're taking basically that same palette of fundamental technologies and scaling it up to do overture with everything we've learned from having done XB-1. XB-1 is what? One-seater, two-seater? It's obviously not a large... It's a single-seat airplane, yeah. Single test pilot.

Yeah, single test pilot. And originally there was a second seat in the airplane, which I was very excited about because I planned to be in it. But as we got further in the program, we realized it wasn't really justifiable that we didn't need it. And so it came out. The second seat is now basically a bunch of test equipment. All right. Is there a big difference between scaling up from that to obviously a passenger size plane with hundreds of, well, what would be overtures maximum capacity, 100 passengers, 200? Yeah.

Overture is relatively small. It's basically like we took the business class cabin on a wide muddy and we chopped off and made it go fast. So the sweet spot for overture is around 64 seats. Okay. You can put more in, but it wouldn't be as comfortable. You could take them out and make it extra luxurious, but the sweet spot is really about 64. I'll let Nick talk about the scaling. Sure. Yeah. And so,

What's interesting about the XP1 program is that, to Blake's point, there really is no brand new technology inside of it. But the issue that we found was that

The industry's muscle and design knowledge had really atrophied when it came to Supersonics. You've got military programs where there's some design know-how that's under lock and key and not really accessible to the outside world. But if you look in the commercial side of things, there was just nothing going on there. So it's not like there's a design team that just finished a project that we could just hire in and do the design of XP1. So we basically had to do it from scratch. We had to assemble a team and figure out how to do all

all of that design development, manufacturing and testing of a supersonic airplane. It just had frankly never been done before. And I think that's probably the source of why a lot of people think that what we were trying to do would be impossible for a startup to accomplish. So the XP-1 program has certainly, I think, put that to bed and shown that we have been able to design, build, test and fly a supersonic airplane. The

XP1 was originally envisioned as roughly a one-third scale demonstration of what the airliner would be. And the designs have diverged somewhat significantly since that happened. And we kind of look at that as a good thing. Like if Overture basically looked like an expanded XP1, that would suggest that we really didn't learn very much throughout the process of designing and building it. And so basically all the lessons that we learned developing XP1

have been have informed the architecture of Overture. We kind of learned where the inflection points in pain and difficulty and risk versus reward were. For example, XB-01 was originally envisioned to be a Mach 2.2 aircraft. And we just learned that everything gets a whole lot harder after about Mach 1.7, 1.8 or so. And so a lot of the material systems that we want to use on a certified platform are a lot easier below that speed.

Things like inlet design, propulsion efficiency are a lot better below that speed. So it was a springboard, a great stepping stone, both in proof of capability, as well as we just learned where all of those inflection points were. And scaling that up is, we're taking the benefits of having done it and applying that to Overture. Okay. So what specific kind of technical elements of the X1B...

Have you found, have informed the Overture design the most? Have you found? Yeah, it's XB1 and XB1B, but yeah. I think it's the XB1B and XB1B.

But yeah, I'll take this and Nick, you should add to it as well. It's everything. People do paper studies of airplanes all the time. And every airplane looks great on paper. And it's easy to look like you've solved all the problems, but actually you've only solved 10% of them. And bringing together an airplane...

that actually works from every aspect, not just high speed aerodynamics, but low speed aerodynamics, systems, landing gear, having all of that work together in a way that's safe enough for us to put a human on board is, involves tremendous complexity and tremendous learning and actually putting an airplane in the air, flying it and then flying it supersonic is the only way for us to know for ourselves that we've actually learned a hundred percent of what we need to know. And, and,

And there are, you know, when I look at XP-1, I don't just see a beautiful airplane. I just see a bunch of lessons learned.

And some of them are technical, some of them are about teams, some of them are about how you manage a complex project. There's just learning all over the place. Just to give you a few examples, the hard part of building a supersonic jet is actually the low-speed part. And particularly with a target top speed of Mach 2.2, that drove XB-1 to a very long slender shape with a very narrow wing.

And that airplane flies great fast. It's very difficult to make that takeoff and land stably. And so we spent about two years learning how to make low speed aerodynamics work. And it drove some small changes to the wing. It drove some subtle but really important changes to the nose. It drove digital stability augmentation to the flight control system, etc.

And so we've had all those lessons learned. And the biggest thing we did in Overture is actually building more pragmatism. We learned where we'd been overly ambitious on XB1 beyond what we needed to be. And we knew what we needed to simplify in Overture in order to make it easier and more pragmatic to do. So, for example, by dropping the top speed from 2.2 to 1.7, we add maybe 15 minutes to the transatlantic flight.

but we enable the wing to be much higher aspect ratio. So a wider, a wider wing and that wider wing is a lot easier at low speed versus, versus that teeny tiny little wing on XB1. And, you know, I think if we hadn't had that experience on XB1, well, one learning how to solve the problem. So it goes like later on, we will go back and build faster airplanes. But we learned, we learned where the hard parts are and it taught us a lesson about,

pragmatism and simplifying requirements that is tremendously fruitful on Overture. Superb. It's a beautiful looking plane from the designs. It reminds me a lot of Thunderbirds. Is that just a coincidence on the aircrafting in Thunderbirds if you're old enough to have watched that? Yeah. I mean, I'm also thinking of the air show team. Yeah.

But the, I mean, physics drive the shape of an airplane. Of course. You know, at least as much as engineers do. And so, you know, supersonic airplanes, they kind of want to be long and skinny. Yes, of course. Yeah. Fair enough. So how is Boom addressing concerns about fuel efficiency, emissions, and especially noise for supersonic aircraft? Yeah, we're taking all of that real seriously. And the...

we want supersonic flight to be good news for every stakeholder. And so, starting with, I'll start with noise. Supersonic jets have a bad reputation for being loud because every, basically there was Concorde that had converted military engines and then every other supersonic jet's been a fighter jet. And they've got rip-roaring loud engines and

And, you know, if you're an airplane nerd like me, that's kind of cool, but that's not what people want to have flying over their heads, you know, 100 times a day. And so it turns out the designing for quiet operation is fundamental to the entire airplane design. So one of the benefits of going to Mach 1.7 on Overture

is that we get that wider wing and that wider wing is much more efficient at low speed. And being more efficient at low speed means we need less engine thrust. And then the engines, these are custom built, commercially optimized engines that are turbo fans. They don't have afterburners. And so we need less thrust, about 20% less thrust. And then that thrust is much quieter and much more fuel efficient because it's a turbo fan, not an afterburning turbo jet.

And you see that kind of redound all over the airplane. So we're using a whole bunch of new technology to make it quieter. Much of that is also aligned with making it more fuel efficient. And then we're designing Overture to run on kind of any blend of fuel. So it can run on classic fuel. They can also run on up to 100% pure sustainable fuel, which is emerging fuel

They're still emerging, still scaling, but there's good reason to be optimistic about a future of synthetic, sustainable fuel and overtures need to be able to run on 100%.

uh, sustainable fuel compared to today's airplanes, they can only go to 50, 50. So I think we're going to see that from a, a noise perspective, overture is not going to be any louder than other airplanes we have flying today. Um, and, uh, with, with scaling a sustainable fuel, there's, there's potentially a carbon advantage, uh, running, uh, running supersonic versus flying on a, you know, a Boeing or Airbus with at most 50, 50, uh, sustainable fuel. Okay. Great. Um,

Leading in from that, so what are the primary regulatory challenges boomers have faced with supersonic flights?

the really cool thing is there aren't any. And, uh, the, and this, this goes back to that, that fundamental philosophy we were talking about where, um, you know, we are, we, we, we didn't invent anything fundamentally new and we're not asking regulators to approve anything they haven't already approved from a basic technology perspective. And, you know, we, I think we probably all see the same headlines, but the big guys and, you know, they got, they got sideways with their regulators for a bunch of reasons, including they just lost trust. And, um,

And the way we've approached working with our regulators at Boom is just completely different. Our view is they're part of the team helping us make sure that we do this right.

and they're there to kind of look over our shoulder and help check our work. And we don't hide anything. We invite them to come early, come often. And FAA came and met with us for the first time before we started building XP1, what was still in the drawing board. It came when it looked when it was a bucket of parts in the hangar floor. They came when it rolled out and they came when we were ready to fly it. And we let them see anything they wanted to see. We told them what we're doing, why we're doing it, and we asked for their feedback. And the result was by the time we said we're ready for our

paperwork, they already knew everything they needed to know and they already bought in. And so what could take 90 days took 90 minutes. And then they leaned in even further and FAA gave us actually the first ever permit to fly a civilian airplane supersonic over land for test flights. And this is the kind of thing that happens when we really embrace our regulator as part of the team with an important role.

And we welcome the scrutiny. We don't run from it. And I think that's the, if you look back at how Boeing did programs in the 1990s, that was the old way it was done. And it was very successful. And, you know, and then I think the industry kind of lost their way and got adversarial. And there's no reason for that. And you get a better, safer, faster result by just working together.

Will that be applicable to other markets like in Europe or in Britain, different regulators or also talking as well? I mean, we're engaged in Europe. We're engaged lightly in the UK. And I think we'll get the best results by getting the best people to give us feedback and tell us what they see that we don't see.

And then, you know, and then when there's a problem or a challenge or how do we work through this design aspect or how do we work through some trade-off, you know, I want them right there alongside us helping us work through the trade-off. And then, you know, and then we're not versus this approach of like, we're going to go make all those decisions in a vacuum. And then we're going to show up at the end of the program and try to prove why we did it all the right way. And, you know, at that point, inevitably there's going to be pushback and then they're going to want to change things, but it's going to be really difficult to change it because they've already made all the decisions. Right.

And the key thing is to get the feedback early and then you get the buy-in as you go. And I always tell the Overture team, I want FAA in here and EASA in here, which is the European FAA, while the clay is still wet and they're able to actually help shape it. And that's how we approach it with FAA. That's how we approach it with customers. For example, earlier this week, we did a major technical review of Overture. It was two full days.

And we look at everything on that airplane, tip to tail, aerodynamics, stability and control, propulsion, hydraulics, flight controls, everything. And, you know, our customer United was in there.

We had non-advocate reviewers who are kind of retired technical experts from places like Boeing or Gulfstream. And we're going to do a similar exercise with FAA and a similar exercise with European EASA. And it's just going to be good for everything. And we talk very openly about what are we happy with? What are we not yet happy with? Where

Where are some of the hard problems? Where are the technical risk? And that transparency, you know, transparency with customers, transparency with regulators is going to make a better airplane. Absolutely.

So what went out over tour becomes commercial. Um, what do you see as its primary audience or primary, uh, passengers? Who would you be? Who do you think will be using the plane the most? Yeah. I mean, our ultimate goal is to deliver super iconic flight, you know, kind of for the rest of us. Um, and you know, like, uh,

The way a lot of technologies come to market, they start at higher price points. You know, cars, electric cars, cell phones, Internet connections, like, you know, all of these things started expensive. You know, and now we're at a point where, you know, our kids walk around with cell phones and, you know, electric cars are becoming mainstream. And Super Summit Flight, I think, is going to go down a very similar trajectory.

Uh, or it's going to start out for, you know, kind of anybody who would think of flying business class today. Plus I think some people who don't think the luxury is worth it, but then the time savings is worth it. You know, they may buy up to it. Some people who are flying private today might actually fly commercial because they can actually go faster commercial than they will be go privately.

Um, and then over time that, you know, that cost comes down, you know, but I, I think, you know, what, one of our, one of our goals is to elevate the air travel experience and, you know, flying used to be this just like magical, magical thing, you know, that, that we could all look forward to, like, like how amazing is it that as humans, you know, we can travel into the sky, you know, today at 80% of the speed of sound and near complete safety, you know, and it looked out the world that we can see, you know,

roads and bridges and factories and cities and the natural beauty of the planet. And from this vantage point that no bird could even have. And, you know, and yet we've turned it into an experience that most people dread. And, you know, and I think there is a certain, um,

kind of bargain basement level of air travel that we may never do. But anybody who values, the kind of people who value a good meal or a nice vacation, I want to make SuperSmartFlight available to them and do it in a way that is elevated and uplifting and where people feel treated well. And the cost of that's going to come down over time.

It could be like for the general public, like going on a cruise. Yeah, for the general public. To give you an example, when I was in my basement starting the company, I had three really young kids and they had a grandfather who lived in Hong Kong.

And they got to see him maybe three or four times their whole life before he passed. 18 hours from Denver to Hong Kong is just too long, especially for the very young and the very old. And if we cut that flight in half, from 18 hours to nine hours, it wouldn't have been that we saved a handful of hours. It would have been that we went way more.

And the result would have been this human connection between my kids and their actually pretty special grandfather. And to do that, we need to speed the flights up. We need to do that safely. And we need to do it at a price point that a family could afford.

And so that's, you know, are we going to get there in one go? No, it's going to require iteration. You know, there's going to be an Overture 1 and an Overture 2 and an Overture 3. And there's going to be, you know, Overture 1 doesn't have a lot of invention in it. But Overture 2 and Overture 3 are going to be a completely different story. We're going to really push the envelope. And technically, that's going to be fun. And there's going to be so much like amazing engineering that I'm excited to work on with just great people.

But also the human impact is going to be really significant because imagine when a family can go connect across oceans. Imagine kids grow up, you know, with having made friends on other continents. Like that's the future we could deliver. And it's, you know, I find it very beautiful because it's right at the intersection of just like some of the most amazing technical work that could ever be done and also some of the most impactful from a deep human perspective.

I like that answer. Yeah. One thing that's kind of overlooked a lot of the time is the time cost, the cost in time. Like some people will be happy to wait 18 hours to save 10 pound flight ticket. To me is madness. Right. Yeah. And I, you know, I think that those kinds of people may never be the supersonic passengers, but there are a whole lot of people who will look at it and say, my time is worth it. My quality of my life is worth it.

And I think the most important thing here is not breaking the sound barrier. It's breaking the time barrier. When you break the time barrier, there's a whole bunch of trips that people will take that they otherwise just wouldn't take. And ironically, looking at the time barrier here, I'm looking at the clock and I'm now a little bit late for my next conversation. So I need to say thank you and goodbye. But if we can go longer, that's totally cool. Great. Thank you, Blake. Thanks for your time. Thanks, Chris. Nice to meet you.

All right, Nick, this is putting up more up your street then. So what safety challenges arise with supersonic speeds and how does the XD1 test and overcome them? Sure, safety challenges, there's nothing really inherently any more dangerous about supersonic travel as opposed to subsonic travel. We were talking earlier about kind of the design constraints and it's, you know, it's not,

challenging to design a supersonic airplane. It's not challenging to design a slow airplane, but to blend those two capabilities in one airframe is challenging. And the farther those design points get, the

the greater speed range of operation that the airplane has, the more challenging it gets. And so it really comes down to that. If you're going to design something for a high top speed, it's going to require you to be minimum drag, a small, highly tapered wing. And that's just not the right shape to have the most stable platform at a slow speed. So you need to add in those technologies like stability augmentation,

And just highly refined, highly iterated aerodynamic design. So that is something we've been able to demonstrate on XP1. Additionally, too, I don't know if you're familiar with, you know, Concorde had that famous drooping nose, right? And so that was deployed for takeoff and landing just because the airplane physically needed to look pretty long and pointy. And that disabled adequate forward vision from the flight deck.

So it was a simple solution. Let's just mechanically drop the nose of the airplane and get the nose out of the way of the pilots. What we've been able to prototype and demonstrate on XP-1 is not a synthetic viewing system, but an augmented viewing system where we have cameras that look down forward in front of the airplane and display that on a digital display to the pilot.

And so that's something that is already certified and exists in certain business jet applications. And we were able to kind of in-house grow that to develop and deploy it on XP1 and demonstrate safe takeoff and landings using that system. I'm not too familiar with the early days of Concorde. I'm kind of shocked they didn't have a similar kind of camera remote viewing system instead of designing the entire nose to drop down. It seems a bit over the top. Right.

They would have had cameras back then.

Yeah, I was many decades before I was born when they were making those trade studies, but electronics were a lot heavier back in the days and maybe there were some reliability concerns. But ultimately now with digital systems, the size of cameras, there's just no comparison from a weight savings perspective and a complexity savings perspective to do it with an enhanced vision system. That makes complete sense. So there's no theoretical maximum speed?

speed then for a passenger jet. The problem is at lower speeds...

Am I understanding correctly, the aerodynamics? No, the theoretical maximum. So if you're talking about going, well, why don't we go Mach 5? Well, because the technology just scales linearly with speed, or maybe not linearly, maybe hyperbolically. If you're talking about hypersonic aircraft, there's a lot of buzz around hypersonics nowadays, and those are all mostly government programs,

weapon systems and the technology is not really ready for putting paying customers on it maybe someday but not for many generations of aircraft okay all right then all right thanks for clarifying that um so how do you see the economics of supersonic travel evolving from Overture onwards yeah sure uh so um

Overture one. It's a key mission there is to be at business parity, if not better. The economics right now look to be about $3,500 for a transatlantic business class flight. And that's a starting point. And so

Right now, there's tens of millions of customers a year that are flying over the Atlantic, and they're paying for big comfy seats and even late beds because the flight is so long and uncomfortable. What we're saying is that you can spend the same amount of money or even less and get there in twice the time and have a hotel room with a bed and sleep on the ground in much more comfort. So why spend the time on the airplane? So that makes total sense right now. And there's an existing market.

When Concorde retired in the early 2000s, the trans-oceanic business class flying was not what it is today. That market has expanded dramatically. And looking to the future, it's...

When the jet age was dawning and jet airliners were first thing, what you saw in the decade that followed that was recreational travel to places like Hawaii expanded dramatically because there was a new capability. And as Blake was describing, it just unlocks trips that people would not otherwise take. So the early adopters will be the folks who are

flying business class across the ocean already. And as soon as people realize that the trip is not so painful and it's not so hard to do, we see an expansion of the market. And so that those tens of millions of customers will increase significantly over time. And another constraint with Concorde, there wasn't too many flying units was there. So presumably with Overture, you wouldn't have 10, you could potentially have hundreds of

You'd have many flights. Yeah. Yeah. Concorde was a program of national prestige and it was so awesome. It was a beautiful aircraft, but it's just, yeah, the economics were left out of it.

America had its own supersonic transport category aircraft that was developed. It was a 300-seat Mach 3 airplane. It would have been even more impressive of a technical feat, but the economics were even worse, and it probably never would have got off the ground if they decided to build it. Yeah, absolutely. That would be impressive to have seen that, though. So looking ahead, what's your vision for Boom in the future of air travel?

Sure. The first step will be to make supersonic routine. And again, like I said, at that price parity or even better than today's existing business class.

um after that we're just going to keep iterating increasing efficiency and further bring the cost down so that the default way to travel would be twice as fast um like i said there's probably a bottom uh market that that would not appeal to uh paying a little bit more for going faster and there's obviously things that are not time sensitive like uh cargo airliners are not going to go away um

Large aircraft hauling goods across the oceans will not go away. But we're going to keep iterating on this until it's the default way to travel. There's also, you know, right now there's still an hour isopersonic ban for flying across the continental United States.

And, uh, what we need is for industry and regulatory agencies to kind of come together and agree upon a sonic boom noise standard to get that, um, legislation like revoked basically. Um,

That ban went into place during the 70s when we were afraid of the skies being blackened by Concords flying all over the place. That never really materialized and the laws still in the books. So the issue with the ban right now is we could design any aircraft to basically operate at any given sonic boom threshold. But without a standard in place, you know, we could spend a billion dollars in a decade developing something that falls one decibel short.

of whatever that standard may be someday. And there's no real way to predict what it's going to be. So there are programs going on right now, like NASA's X 59 program, which is a low boom demonstrator. Um, and that is, um, to, uh,

generate community noise acceptability standards. And they'll combine that with a lot of data that they frankly already have that's on the books right now, but they're going to update it. And once the standard is agreed upon, we see the ability to incorporate low-boom technology in future generations, but it won't be the thrust of our first product. Okay. Any idea on that new standard would be completed when it will come out? There's no... No, there's really no defined...

uh, time horizon for it. What the FAA has agreed to do, um, recently, uh, four or six years ago or something like that is they've agreed to basically take a fresh look at the new data that's available every two years. And, um, there's basically a committee that meets to, to review the data on it. Okay. Okay. Obviously transatlantic sort of problem. It's just over the continental USA. Is it the same for say Europe, other continents, uh,

Yeah. Not everywhere, but most places. Most places. And so Overture is really designed to be a trans-oceanic airliner. The interesting bit is that that doesn't necessarily limit it to coastal cities only. Overture has a higher cruise speed than a conventional airliner. It'll cruise at about 0.94 Mach when subsonic. And that's basically the fastest speed that we can go without going, I'd say, accidentally supersonic if we encountered a gust or

And so that for regulatory reasons, about 0.94 is the upper limit there. But what that does is it unlocks some cities that are inside of the coast to be desired routes. We do the lion's share of the work, supersonic speed over the ocean and then slow down once you get into the airspace, country airspace, right? That's right. Right. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah, it would open up routes that say would go to Chicago. Yeah, absolutely. So are there plans for different like private jet sized supersonic boom aircraft and a larger...

passenger aircraft in the future? Not currently. We've seen a lot of, there have been a lot of companies that have studied the supersonic business jet space. And I think a lot of people, perhaps wrongly so, thought that a supersonic business jet would have to precede an airliner. But when you actually look at the business models, it doesn't quite make sense. Business jets spend more than 90% of their time flying over land.

where that speed advantage would just not be there. They wouldn't be able to utilize it. So the amount of time that they actually spend crossing oceans is very infrequent. So it's a really niche design, whereas there's a clear market right now for trans-oceanic travel at supersonic speeds. Yeah, makes sense. And from a propulsion point of view, might sound like a silly question, you can't have an electrically powered supersonic aircraft. Is that possible?

The energy density isn't really there. We're probably a generation or two away from the ability to replace Jet A as the energy source for something like an airliner. There's a lot of work going on right now on much smaller, much slower airplanes that could probably be rightfully converted to electric propulsion. But that kind of technology does not really exist at the airliner scale.

Call it back to Thunderbirds, you wouldn't have a nuclear-powered one. Wouldn't be possible. Yeah, as part of a comic book series, maybe, but yeah. Not realistic in the next couple generations of airliners. Fair enough. Brilliant. That's all my questions. Is there anything else you'd like to add that you find is important for our audience to know regarding Boom and Overture, XV1?

Yeah, just keep following the story. XB-1 is, we've accomplished seven test flights on it. We've taken it to 80% of the speed of sound on those test flights. We're setting up to do another test flight tomorrow. That'll be Saturday, November 16th, if the weather holds out. But we are rapidly approaching breaking the sound barrier for the first time as the first independently funded aircraft to ever do so. And

And really, I hope people recognize and appreciate that what we're doing is very possible. And it's inevitable that supersonic airline travel is going to be here. It's just a matter of some hard work that we're heads down accomplishing right now. So keep following us. That supersonic flight before the end of the year is going to be a significant milestone.

Absolutely. Look forward to seeing it. Good luck tomorrow. If anything goes to plan, I'm sure we'll be writing about it on our platform when you do that. Is there any social media you'd like to promote before we go? Videos? Yeah.

We've got a blog. You can find it on our website. And we also have a YouTube channel where there's some interesting videos about some recent test flights that we've done that if you haven't seen them are worth checking out. If you're into seeing what it's really like to test fly a new development supersonic airplane, fantastic. All right, great. Well, thank you for your time, Blake and Nick. That was very interesting.

That concludes this episode of Lexicon. Thank you all for tuning in and being our guest today. Follow our social media channels for the latest science and technology news. Also, don't forget to explore our IE shop. Goodbye for now.