Blake Scholl: Why Plane Speed Stalled, Supersonic Commercial Flight, & Revolutionizing the Engine

The talk opens by framing commercial aviation as an industry that stopped advancing. The program introduction describes an aircraft "Set to fly at Mach 1.7 with 130 orders for major airlines" and frames the company's mission as bringing back supersonic passenger travel and making the planet "dramatically more accessible." The opening also says the whole demonstrator airplane "was built by essentially 50 people."

The central historical contrast is 1969: the year of the moon landing and of an airliner flying through the sound barrier. More than half a century later, the speaker argues, "we can't go to the moon" and "we can't fly faster than the speed of sound." Concorde's "political legacy" is identified as a ban on supersonic flight over the U.S.

Incumbent stagnation is the second part of the diagnosis. Boeing brought in the jet age with the 707 in 1957, but its latest airliner is described as "a literal carbon fiber copy of their first." The speaker adds that the company has interns born after Boeing last launched a new airplane in 2004, and calls this "insane." The opening line puts it more sharply: "it's David and Goliath, but Goliath is like asleep."

What if we could cross the Atlantic in three and a half hours? What if Sydney were as accessible as Honolulu is today? What would that do for business, for culture, even for love?

The speaker presents the company's origins as unlikely. Twelve years earlier, the speaker was "a software engineer and an ads guy from Amazon and Groupon," and the idea that someone "with nothing more than a pilot's license" could change aviation "seemed laughable."