 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Live, I'm Lisa Martin. Really exciting topic coming up for you next. Please welcome Blake Sholder, Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having me, Lisa. And your background gives me all the way with what we're gonna talk about in the next few minutes or so, but Supersonic Flight has existed for quite a long time, what, 50 or so years. I think those of us in certain generations, remember the Concorde, for example, but the technology to make it efficient and mainstream is only recently been approved by, or accepted by regulators. Tell us a little bit about Boom, your mission to make the world more accessible with Supersonic Commercial Flight. Well, Supersonic Flight has actually been around since 1949 when Chuck Yeager broke the speed barrier, or sorry, the sound barrier, and as many of you know, he actually passed yesterday at 97. So very sad to see one of the supersonic pioneers behind us, but as I say goodbye to Yeager, a new era of supersonic flight is here. And if you look at the history of progress and transportation since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we used to make regular progress and speed as we went from the horse to the iron horse to the boats to the early propeller airplanes and into the jet age. And what happened was every time we made transportation faster, instead of spending less time traveling, we actually spent more time traveling because there were more places to go, more people to meet. We haven't had a world war since the dawn of the jet age. Places like Hawaii have become major tourist destinations but today it's been 60 years since we've had a mainstream step forward in speed. And so what we're doing here at Boom is picking up our Concorde left off, building an aircraft that flies faster by factor two, that anything you can get a ticket on today and yet is 75% more affordable than Concorde was. So we wanna make Australia as accessible as Hawaii yesterday. We wanna enable you across the Atlantic, do business, be home in time, detect your kids into bed or take a three-day business trip to Asia and let you do it in just 24 hours. I like the sound of all of that, even getting on a plane right now in general, I think we all do. So interesting that you wanna make this more accessible and I did see the news about Chuck Yeager last night. Designing though the first supersonic airliner overture it's called in decades, as you said, this dates back 60 years. Rolling it out, goal is to roll it out in 2025 and flying more than 500 trans-oceanic routes. Talk to me about how you're leveraging technology in AWS to help facilitate that. Right, well, sort of the really fascinating things is the new generation of airplanes are getting born in the cloud and then they're gonna go fly through actual clouds. And so there are a bunch of revolutions in technology that have happened since Concorde's time that are enabling what we're doing now. They're breakthroughs in materials. We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber. They're breakthroughs in engines. We've gone from after-burning turbo jets that are loud and inefficient to quiet, clean, efficient turbo fans. But one of the most interesting breakthroughs has been being able to do design digitally and iteration digitally versus physically. So when Concorde was designed as an example, they were only able to do about a dozen wind tunnel tests because they were so expensive and so time consuming. And on our XB1 aircraft, which is our prototype that rolled out in October, we did hundreds of iterations of the design in virtual wind tunnels where we could spin up a simulation on HPC cluster and AWS, often more than 500 cores. And then we'd have our airplanes flying through virtual wind tunnels, thousands of flight scenarios. You can figure out which are the losers, which are the winners, keep iterating on the winners. And you arrive at an aerodynamic design that is more efficient at high speed for going very safely, very quickly in a straight line, but also very smooth, controllable for safe takeoff and landing. And part of the art of supersonic airplane design is to accomplish both of those things in one airplane and being able to design in the cloud, and iterate in the cloud allows a startup to do what previously only governments and militaries could do. I mentioned we rolled out our XB1 prototype in October. That's the first time anyone has rolled out a supersonic civil aircraft since the Soviet Union did it in 1968. And we're able to do as a startup because of computing. That's incredible, born in a cloud, to fly in the cloud. So talk to me about a lot of opportunity that technology has really accelerated. We've seen a lot of acceleration this year in particular digital transformation in businesses that if they haven't pivoted are probably in some challenging waters. So talk to us about how you're going all in with AWS to facilitate all these things that you just mentioned, which is dramatic change over 12 wind tunnel tests for the Concorde and how many times did it fly, people? I mean, for 27 years, but not that many flights. It never changed the way mainstream, it never changed the way you and I fly, right? So how are we going all in? So we've been using AWS for, basically since the founding of the company. But what we're doing now is taking things that we were doing outside of the cloud and moving them to the cloud. As an example, we have 525 terabytes of XB1 design and test data that we used to be backed up off-site and what we're doing is migrating into the cloud and then your data's next year compute. You can start to do these really interesting things. As an example, you can run machine learning models to calibrate your simulations to your wind tunnel results, which accelerates convergence, allows you to run more iterations even faster and ultimately come up with a more efficient airplane, which means it's going to be more affordable for all of us to go break the sound barrier. And that sounds like kind of one of the biggest differences that you just said is that it wasn't built for mainstream before, now it's going to be accessibility, affordability as well. So how are you going to be leveraging the cloud, design, manufacturing, but also other areas like the on-board experience, which I'm already really excited to be participating in in the next few years? Yeah, so there's so many examples. We've talked about design a little bit already. It's going to manifest in the manufacturing process where the supply chain will be totally digital. The factory operations will be run out of the cloud. So what that means concretely is literally there'll be like a million parts of this airplane and for any given unit goes through the production line, you'll instantly know where they all are. You'll know which serial numbers went on which airplanes. You'll understand if there was a problem with one of it, how you fixed it. And as you continue to iterate and refine the airplane, this sort of things that's actually a big deal with digital and the cloud is you know exactly what design iteration went into exactly which airplane and that allows you to actually iterate faster and any given airline with any given airplane will actually know exactly what airplane they have. But the next one that rolls off the line might be even a little bit better. And so it allows you to keep track of all of that. It allows you to iterate faster. It allows you to spot bottlenecks in your supply chain before they impact production. And then it allows you to do preventive maintenance later. So there's to be digital instrumentation all over the airplane. It's going to update the cloud on, you know are the engines running at expected temperature? Something run a little bit hot. It's something vibrating more than it should vibrate. And so you catch these things way before there are any kind of real maintenance issue. You flag it in the cloud and the next time the airplane lands there's a tech waiting for the airplane with whatever the part is and able to install it and you don't have any downtime and you're never anywhere close to a safety issue. You're able to do a lot more preventively versus what you can do today. Wow. So you have to say that you're going to be able to have a hundred percent visibility into manufacturing design. Everything is kind of an understatement. When you launch XP1 your prototype you said in October. So during the pandemic, as I mentioned we've been talking for months now on the virtual cube about the acceleration of digital transformation. Andy Jassy talked about it in his keynote at AWS reinventing reinvent this year virtual. What were some of the advantages that you've got being able to stay on track? I imagine if you were on track to launch in October during a time that has been so chaotic everywhere else including air travel. Well, some of it's very analog and some of it's very digital. So to start with the analog, we took COVID really seriously at boom. We went into the pandemic first hit. We shut the company down for a couple of weeks so we could kind of get our feet underneath of us. And then we started testing everyone who had to work on the airplane every 14 days. We were religious about wearing masks. And as a result, we haven't had anyone catch COVID within the office. And I'm super proud that we're able to stay productive and stay safe during the pandemic. And you do that, but kind of taking it seriously doing common sense things. And then there's the digital effort. And so part of the company runs digitally. What we're able to do is when there's kind of a higher alert level, we go a little bit more digital. When there's a lower alert level, we have more people in the office because we still really do value that in-person collaboration. And which brings it back here to a bigger point. It's been predicted for a long time that the advent of digital communication is going to cause us not to need to travel. And what we've seen since the dawn of the telephone is that it's actually been the opposite. The more you can know somebody even a little bit at distance, the hungrier you are to go see them in person, whether it's a business contact or someone you're in love with. No matter what it is, there's still that appetite to be there in person. And so I think what we're seeing with the digitization of communications ultimately gonna just be very, it's very complimentary with supersonic because you can get into somebody a little bit over a long distance. You can have some kinds of exchanges and then the friction for being able to see them in person is gonna drop. And that's a wonderful combination. I think everybody on the planet welcomes that for sure, given what we've all experienced in the last year. You can have a lot of conversations by Zoom, obviously this is one of them, but there is to your point, something about that in-person collaboration that really takes things can anyway to the next level. I am curious. So you launched XP1 in October. As I mentioned a minute ago, and I think I read from one of your press releases, planning to launch in 2025, the overture with over 500 trans-oceanic routes. What can we expect from Zoom in the next year or two? Are you on track for that 2025? Yeah, things are going great. So to give a sense of what the next few years hold. So we rolled out the assembled XP1 aircraft this year. Next year, that's gonna fly. So that will be the first civil supersonic flying aircraft ever built by an independent company. And along the way, we are building the foundation of overture. So that design efforts happening now as XP1 is breaking the sound barrier, it'll be finalizing the overture design. In 22, we'll break ground on the factory. In 23, we'll start building the first airplane. In 25, we'll roll it out. In 26, we'll start flight tests. And then we'll go through the flight tests methodically, systematically as carefully as we can, and then be ready to carry passengers. As soon as we are convinced it's safe, which will be right around the end of the decade, most likely. Okay, exciting. And so it sounds like you talked about the safety protocols that you guys put in place in the office, which is great. It's great to hear that. But also that this time hasn't derailed because you have the massive capabilities of AWS to be able to do all of the work that's necessary way more than was done before with the Concord and that you can do that remotely with cloud as a big facilitator of that communication. Yeah, you're able to do, the cloud enables a lot of computational efficiencies. And I think about the, many times projects are not measured in, how many months or years exactly does it take you to get done? But it's actually much easier to think about in terms of number of iterations. And so every time we do an airplane iteration, we look at the aerodynamics high speed, we look at the low speed, we look at the engine, we look at the weights, we look at stability and control, we look at pilots line of sight, et cetera, et cetera. And every time you do an iteration, you're kind of looking around all of those and saying, what can I make better? But each one of those lines up a little bit differently with the rest. Now, for example, to get the best airplane aerodynamically doesn't have a good view for the pilot. And that's why Concord had that droop nose famously. It was like, you get the nose out of the way so we can see the runway. And so we're able to do digital systems for virtual vision to let the pilot kind of look through the nose of the runway. But even then they're trade-offs, like how good of a natural window do you need? And so your ability to make progress in all of this is proportional to how quickly you can make it around that iteration loop, that design cycle loop. And that's part of where the cloud helps us. And we've got some stuff we've built in-house that runs on the cloud that lets you basically press a button with a whole set of airplane parameters. And bam, it gives you an instant report of like, oh, was it better, was it a good change or a bad change? Based on running some pretty high fidelity simulations with a very high degree of automation. And you can actually do many of those in parallel. And so it's about, you know, at this stage of the program, it's about accelerating your design iterations, giving everyone on the team visibility into those. And then I think you get together in person as it makes sense to. They were actually hitting a major design milestone with Overture this week. And we're COVID testing everybody and get them all in the same room. Cause sometimes that in-person collaboration is really significant, even though you could still do so much digitally. I totally agree. There's certain things that you just can't replicate. Last question, since my brother is a pilot first Southwest and retired Lieutenant Colonel from the Air Force, any special training that pilots will have to have? Are there certain pilots that are going to be maybe lower hanging fruit? They have military experience versus commercial flight. Just curious. Yeah. So our XB1 aircraft is being flown by test pilots. There's one X Navy, one X Air Force on our crew, but Overture will be accessible to any commercial pilot. So think about it as if you're, if you're used to flying Boeing to be like switching to Airbus or vice versa. So the Concorde was a complicated aircraft to fly cause they didn't have computers and all the complexity of supersonic flight was right there in the pilot's hands. And in Overture, all that gets abstracted by software and the ways the flight controls change over speed regimes. You don't have to worry about it. The airplane will just handle beautifully no matter what you're doing. And so there are many, many places to innovate but actually pilot experience is not one of them because the more conventional you can make it for people like your brother, the easier it's gonna be for them to learn the aircraft and therefore the safer it's gonna be to fly. I'll let him know. Like this has been fantastic, really exciting to see what Boom Supersonic is doing and the opportunities to make supersonic travel accessible. And I think at a time when everybody wants the world to open up. So by 2026, I'm gonna be looking for my ticket. Awesome. Can't wait to have you on board. Likewise, for Blake Scholl, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Q's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2020.