In a mid-June day in a parking lot beside Boom Supersonic’s new “superfactory” at Piedmont Triad International Airport, state and local officials sampled wares from two nearby food trucks, cooled off with personal fans that looked like miniature jet engines
and listened to the pounding beat of the X Ambassadors’ pop hit “BOOM.”
The song provided a timely tune as the string of politicians and economic development officials marched across the stage to offer glowing portraits of a fast-moving, Mach 1 future.
As they spoke, an overcast day cleared, and it was difficult to imagine how anything could go wrong with Boom’s quest to restart supersonic commercial flight across the globe. The 10-year-old, Denver-based startup is riding a wave of success, including a successful first flight of its XB-1 “Baby Boom” test aircraft; landing 130 pre-orders and orders for its Overture supersonic jet; inking an undisclosed commitment from a Saudi Arabian investment fund; and finishing the 180,000-square-foot factory exterior ahead of schedule and under budget.
In the next few months, Boom officials say, they’ll install manufacturing test pods in the factory and continue seeking Federal Aviation Administration approval for the Overture and then crank up production. The plan is for the first aircraft to roll out in 2029.
It’s a big deal for North Carolina and Greensboro, where the new factory will employ about 1,700 employees and produce 33 planes a year. The PTI site has room for another building of the same size.
Economists for the state project a $32.3 billion impact over 20 years, and the addition of 2,400 jobs, not including suppliers and other aerospace firms attracted to the state because of Boom. That’s the potential payoff for $131 million in state and local incentives.
“It may be time to change the motto on the (North Carolina) license plate,” Blake Scholl, Boom’s CEO and founder, said at the June gathering. “Not just First in Flight, but First in Supersonic Flight.”
The only drag comes from the aerospace industry, where skepticism remains an unwelcome co-pilot.
Ten years after Scholl, a former Amazon software engineer and marketing exec founded Boom, industry insiders still wonder if the startup can overcome a host of headwinds. The most significant is the astonishingly complex task of building an engine from scratch, says Dan Rutherford, senior director of research and the aviation program director at the International Council for Clean Transportation in San Francisco. “It’s really all about the engine,” he says.
In Rutherford’s view, Boom’s fate was probably sealed when it failed to land an engine-building partner from among the industry’s engine design titans: GE Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney or Rolls-Royce.
Instead, Boom is building an engine with a team of partners that includes Florida Turbine Technologies, a division of Kratos Defense; StandardAero, an international leader in engine maintenance and component repair services; and GE Additive, a GE division that builds high-level parts for aerospace and other fields using 3D printing and other techniques.
Boom put the new group together after breaking up with Rolls-Royce in 2022.
The engine, called Symphony, is based on the same technology as many other engines, but is being designed from scratch. Boom is hoping to thread the needle between necessary power, fuel consumption, noise, and even weight and maintenance requirements.
The engine-creation project is unprecedented.
“Typically, the (big) engine makers spend a lot of their own money developing an engine, in hopes of sort of buying their way onto a new commercial aircraft,” says Rutherford. “The other way is to hire one of those companies, but that’s very, very expensive. Of course, I imagine building your engine from a clean sheet will cost
a bit, too.”
Rutherford points to the failure of Aerion, which attempted to build a supersonic corporate jet and had partnerships with Boeing, GE and NetJets. The company closed in mid-2021, less than six months after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a press conference with Aerion leaders for a planned $375 million factory at the Melbourne Orlando International Airport.
Boom officials note that Aerion never built a plane in 17 years of operation – Boom’s prototype is airborne in just a decade – and that its struggles involved developing a “boom-free” engine, which is a significant question for any non-military supersonic plane.
Commercial supersonic flight is banned over most countries because of the deafening sonic boom. Boom Supersonic plans to get around that problem by literally flying around it. It believes there is plenty of revenue from routes that fly mostly over water, like New York to London or San Francisco to Tokyo.
The Overture can fly at subsonic speeds to handle approaches over land. Still, Aerion’s woes speak to the complex problems Boom faces, and help explain the arched eyebrow of the aerospace industry.
The aviation world has a vested interest in the revival of supersonic flight, says Pat Anderson, professor of aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautics University in Daytona Beach, Florida. “It’s been studied in the lab, but I think a lot of people want to see Boom, or someone, actually building and fielding a (supersonic) plane in the real world,” he says. “So from that standpoint, Boom has support. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of skepticism. They face some real challenges.”
Boom’s biggest hurdle is also the broadest, namely economics, Anderson says.
“I mean, that’s what killed off the Concorde, right?” he says. “Flying at that speed is no secret. We know how to do it. But going faster still costs more. A lot more. How will they do it?”
Boom’s Scholl, 41, envisions his company as the Tesla of the air. He’s confident his company can build a plane that will be profitable and filled with passengers paying roughly the same fares as overseas business class customers, typically
$3,000 to $5,000.
Asked what remaining hurdles keep him up at night, Scholl instead rattled off a list of what doesn’t keep him up. Everyone wants to fly faster, regulatory issues don’t matter for planes flying over oceans, and “we (Boom) have the technology,” he says.
“So what remains?” says Scholl. “It’s the execution. What we are doing is incredibly complex. The last new commercial aircraft company founded by an entrepreneur was Douglas Aircraft … in 1921. So it’s been more than a century. What we’re building here in the superfactory is a lot more complicated than Douglas’ first plane.”
No one disagrees with that. ■
