Boom founder Blake Scholl: from high school dropout to supersonic high-flyer

theguardian.com:

Blake Scholl has been a plane geek since he was a baby, when his parents took him to watch turboprop Cessnas taking off near their home in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“I had a Fisher-Price toy plane, and my parents say I held it up and knew it was like those in the sky,” he says in a video chat from his car in Denver, Colorado. “After that I was always sketching pictures of airplanes and thinking about how to build them.”

While he remained fascinated, he never seriously considered a career in aviation, instead working as a software engineer. But now Scholl, 41, is founder and chief executive of what could be one of the most exciting new aviation companies.

Boom Supersonic, which Scholl founded in 2014, is promising to launch “son of Concorde” supersonic commercial passenger flights as soon as 2026 – some 23 years after Concorde was decommissioned.

Scholl says the fact that he never got the chance to fly on Concorde is part of his motivation for reviving supersonic air travel. “I was waiting but no one was doing it, so eventually I decided to,” he says. “My kids had a grandfather who lived in Hong Kong, an 18-hour flight from here. It was just too far for them as young children and him as an old man. If supersonic flights had been available, they would have seen their grandfather more often.”

He founded Boom in 2014 after selling an e-commerce firm he had founded. But first he wrote a list of possible things he could do next: “I realised that I wanted to work on the most important thing [for society] that’s not impossible.” Scholl rated the ideas according to how happy he would be if they worked out. “At the top was supersonic flight. It was time to figure out why everyone thought it was such a bad idea.”

After a fortnight of intense