Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic Blake Scholl recently sat down with economist Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference to discuss “shower-time solutions to traffic, airports, and aerospace dysfunction.”
Scholl, prior to founding Boom, had careers at Amazon and Groupon. He’s also a pilot.
You can watch the interview, part of the Conversations with Tyler podcast series, on YouTube or listen via your preferred podcast app.
A few of my favorite quotes from the podcast:
“You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.”
My first thought, among several, was where are you going to put all the dirt?
On the topic of improving the aircraft boarding process:
“Imagine an experience where you take your Uber to the airport. The bag that today you would carry on is in the trunk. You step out of the car, someone, maybe even a robot, grabs your bag from the trunk. You don’t see it again. After you land, you get a push notification on your phone that says your Uber’s in slot seven A, and by the time you get to your Uber, your bag is back in the trunk.”
As someone who has flown airline many times, I marvel at the people loading all sorts of things into the overhead bins. No wonder the boarding process is so clumsy. Would such a program improve the boarding/disembarking phase of commercial travel?
On the topic of supersonic flight, Scholl believes Concorde was really just a technology demonstrator:
“Supersonic should have started with a supersonic private jet that could take a handful of well-heeled people coast to coast, with a small airplane, limited range. That would have kicked off a whole S-curve of innovation that would have us all going Mach 5 by now, but we didn’t. Instead, what we did is convince the world that supersonic flight was impractical.”
Putting a speed limit on the airspace over the United States held back development of faster modes of travel, according the Blake.
A tad whimsical at times, the interview had the gears in my head turning for days after listening.
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