Blake Scholl

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Colorado company building Overture — a commercial airliner aiming to revive civilian supersonic passenger flight for the first time since Concorde’s retirement in 2003.

A private pilot since his undergraduate years, Scholl was not an aerospace engineer by training; he worked earlier at Amazon and Groupon, experience he credits with teaching him a sharp contrast between long-term and short-term corporate decision-making. He founded Boom in 2014 on the view that Concorde had been a government-specified prestige project rather than a commercially viable product, and that supersonic flight could work if approached instead as an ordinary technology-adoption problem: start small, get the unit economics right, and iterate. Boom has since broken the sound barrier in test flights and developed ‘Boomless Cruise’, technology intended to avoid an audible sonic boom reaching the ground — material to the 2025 US executive order repealing the 52-year ban on supersonic flight over land. Scholl is an outspoken advocate for the broader ‘progress studies’ case that regulatory and institutional friction, not missing technology, is the main obstacle to faster infrastructure and industrial innovation.

Core positions

• Everyday infrastructure friction is a solvable design and incentive problem, not a fact of life — airport terminal layout, road traffic, security screening, and baggage handling are all, in his account, held back by misaligned business models and regulation rather than by any missing technology.
• Concorde and the Apollo programme were tech demos, not products — government-specified prestige projects built without serious attention to unit economics, which is why both produced no successor for decades.
• Safety-tied regulation behaves as a political one-way door — the asymmetric career risk of removing a rule (versus the invisible cost of keeping it) explains why obviously pointless regulation persists long after its rationale has expired.
• Vertical integration and iteration speed, not scale, are the fix for broken manufacturing — Boom’s Denver engine factory takes raw materials in and ships finished engines out under one roof, specifically to make design iteration cheap rather than risky.
• LLMs compress the cost of regulatory compliance — drafting aviation-certification paperwork against a RAG system over federal regulation turns a two-month task into a same-day one, removing the main reason engineering teams resist changing a design once certified.

In the wiki

• Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure — full conversation on airports, traffic, regulatory one-way doors, Concorde and Apollo, defence-manufacturing supply chains, and using LLMs for certification paperwork
• Two-Way Door Decisions — Scholl’s regulatory one-way-door argument extends Jeff Bezos’s reversibility framework into public policy
• Objectivism — his reading of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on supersonic transport