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TEDx Talks
Published: 2017-09-13
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijubo05nlNs
so long before I move to Denver I grew up in suburban Cincinnati Ohio and I was lucky my grandpa lived just an hour away in rural Indiana we got to play together almost every weekend building sandcastles driving model trains and tending his garden together he was an integral part of my childhood a self made man and a World War two veteran it taught me the value
of self reliance defining joy and everyday moments fast for thirty years and now I have a family of my own two little boys and a little girl and they too have a very special grandpa a founder of a real estate empire so many lessons to share with his grandchildren but tragically he lives eighteen hours away and Hong Kong the travel time is simply prohibitive and they
get to see each other only once a year so will never grow close but it wasn't always this way amazingly the airplanes we have today are no faster than the ones we had when my parents were growing up we have failed to conquer geography for most of human history we lived and died no more than twenty miles from our birth place able to go only as
far as our feet could carry us but in a tiny sliver of history made incredible progress in the eighteen forties if you live in the eastern US and thought of going west it took a covered wagon perilous journey took months and you didn't visit you moved with no hope of ever coming back in eighteen sixty nine a breakthrough invention came to market the transcontinental railroad the
journey that previously took months took just eighty three hours by a train now I know that might not sound like much but today's standards but remember this for the first time a New Yorker could dream of going to California and actually coming home and progress continue to accelerate in nineteen oh three the Wright brothers built the first airplane and just three decades later we had transcontinental
air service the journey that stretched out eighty three hours on the railroad shrink to just twenty hours on the propeller aircraft but to really understand the value of speed let's look closely at what happened we went from propellers into the jet age now in the nineteen fifties if you live in San Francisco and you dreamed of a vacation in Hawaii you have to get on one
of these that's right it's a flying boat the journey would take sixteen hours and once you learn that you probably decided to vacation somewhere closer to home but the jet age changed all of this the sixteen hour flight shrink to just six hours and all of a sudden many more people began to choose a vacation in Hawaii travel to why you skyrocketed six fold in the
first decade of the jet age and it kept on growing as we don't hotels tourist attractions in resorts this distant far off state Hawaii exotic remote suddenly became accessible to the whole world but it wasn't just about where you could code was also about what could come to you the Beatles yes the Beatles took the first world tour in nineteen sixty four a tour that would
not have been practical just ten years earlier was slower airplanes and the Jedi change sports to before the jet age what a trip across the country would take most of the day sports teams had to be clustered together in the east out of practical necessity but when you get across the country in six hours all the fun we could bring Major League Baseball and some major
league football coast to coast so next time you enjoy the big game remember to give thanks to the chat its speed made it possible and by the year nineteen sixty nine it seems like progress in aerospace was accelerating in that year after having been a decade behind in the space race America land a man on the moon for the first time brought him home safely and
that same year Concorde flew for the first time faster than the speed of sound supersonic airliner it seems like we're on the cusp of a new era of progress that we can look forward to space exploration an ultra high speed travel Concorde and the SuperSonics were supposed to be to the passenger jet what it had been the propeller aircraft before it and what those aircraft into
the railroad still earlier aboard Concorde the seven hour journey from New York to London would shrink to just three and a half hours fast enough that a New Yorker could do business in London to be home in time for dinner you could fall in love with someone from another continent and it would no longer matter if the relationship was one distance yet somehow fifty years later
moon rockets and supersonic airliners are found only in museums Concord did fly for twenty seven years but its fares were sky high twenty thousand dollars New York to London round trip if you could afford to fly it and it never change mansion transportation and so in two thousand three Concorde retired with no plan to replace it and somehow the supersonic age had ended without ever really
started in this crazy or else in technology do we have something lose it and actually go backwards to make sense of this it helps to turn to the history of progress in aviation see where big breakthroughs came from now many of you know that the first airplane was invented by bicycle entrepreneurs who yearn to be in the air and thought there could be commercial potential for
their invention but what is less well known at the first practical airliner the Douglas DC three and the first jetliner that have one comment were also built by relatively young founder lead companies I eat these airplanes were both bush products now envision the DC three Donald Douglas wanted a new airplane which more people could fly on which airlines could use to offer regular passenger service and
for himself if I could sell thousands that is the requirement of commercial success necessitated the creation of a sustainable economic model these airplanes had to make sense for their passengers for the airlines and for the manufacturers okay well what about SuperSonics well Concord didn't come from a start out reading from an established company it was a joint venture of two governments France and Britain after all
most joint ventures between the French and British have been worse so what was their goal well it was a commercial success the year was nineteen sixty two it was the height of the Cold War and supersonic development was about beating the other guy is into the supersonic age indeed in the nineteen sixties supersonic projects were launched by governments in the U. S. in Europe and in
the Soviet Union the Soviets action they didn't appear first but their airplane had all kinds of problems and after hauling around a couple loads of mail they shut it down in nineteen seventy one the American supersonic competitor it's funded by taxpayers and built by Boeing was over budget and badly behind schedule so Congress pulled the plug leaving just Concorde still coming now in America rather than
embrace Concorde which shows to block it and the FAA imposed a literal speed limit over land and the US speed limit really so Concord finally did arrive in nineteen seventy six but was stillborn we'd rushed into the age of SuperSonics built it out of the nineteen sixties technology which wasn't yet good enough for economical are efficient supersonic travel affairs which you high the aircraft were mostly
empty and with transcontinental flights in the U. S. band it had limited use only fourteen or ever built and entered service so there is no economy scale and in two thousand three fleet was retired mainly for economic reasons become expensive to maintain an air bus stop making spare parts forcing both British Airways and Air France to ground the Concorde's now as we stand here half a
century later the FAA speed limit still stands and it's had a crushing impact on progress you might think that a supersonic renaissance would start with a small private jet for people who can afford to pay for speed whose time is incredibly valuable the problem is most most people wanna fly over land and so developers of private jets couldn't see a big enough market to justify the
development because so that's we've had a century of no progress speed looking back Concorde and Apollo share a common narrative those three amazing inspiring technological achievements but they were done in the pursuit of glory not a commercial success and thus but we quite literally planted flags we were free from the obligation to produce something of enduring value these remarkable inventions look like progress but their actual
result was decades of stagnation regression so in two thousand seven after Concord a retired I was working at a start up an internet start up in Seattle remember that year the iPhone had just come out and we were living in a world where our phones our computers in our communications were all getting faster one day my girlfriend stock on a slow horrifically delayed flight and while
I waited for her I started to wonder whatever happened to faster travel that day I saw the Google alert on supersonic jet because I figured a breakthrough had to be right around the corner and I want to be the first to know how to break the sound barrier but it was crickets there was no credible effort to build a supersonic jet that I could ever fly
on just some crazy sci fi concepts that wouldn't work and some talk of a private jet for billionaires nothing I could use so I started to think could one start a company to build supersonic jets could I start a company to build supersonic jets I thought the answer would be no the challenge seems so daunting after all the American speed limit was still on the books
limit in the market an intercontinental airplanes are amongst the most complicated things ever built by humanity they take years to develop billions to come to fruition and only a handful of gigantic multinational corporations can build them but about three years ago I decided I got a look at it anyway I thought I would do a couple weeks of research and get this supersonic craziness out of
my system but what I found instead was something really surprising and very exciting it turns out that what we haven't had a speed up in fifty years we have had half a century of progress and basic technology for building airplanes today we have dramatically better methods for optimizing aerodynamics we have new materials what carbon fiber composites and we completely changed the way we bill jet engines
now they're more fuel efficient and quieter and it turns out if you take all these other technologies put them together you can build a new generation supersonic airliner one that it costs seventy five percent last operating Concorde that means you can buy a ticket New York to London round trip for about five thousand dollars now I know what your public thinking that still sounds really expensive
and it is it's about what we pay in business class today which is a very large market I look at this and thought man that's a foothold that could be a jumping off point for more mainstream renaissance speed so what what we have to do to do this well we have to create the first new commercial aircraft start up in fifty years excuse me in ninety
five years sounds easy right but the reality is that's what it takes so that's what we decided to take on at my company boom we started working on this seriously about three years ago on the first new supersonic airliner in fifty years and I'm so proud we've completed the design of the first prototype and were about eighteen months away from flying it right here in Denver
so the prototype was little but here's the first production aircraft the boom Jack it's seats fifty five people it will take you from New York to London in time to make an afternoon meeting at home in time to tuck your children into bad it'll save you a whole day round trip across the Atlantic two days across the Pacific and thanks to globalization there's been an explosion
of international travel so that means you can focus on routes like New York to London San Francisco to Tokyo Seattle to Shanghai they're mostly over water and we need not be blocked by the speed limit and thanks to progress in fuel efficiency there's no environmental downside either the carbon impact is about the same as flying business class subsonic today so I would like to invite you
to imagine with me in a world where the red eye flights shrink to just three to four hours and there's excruciating fifteen sixteen seventeen our homes become simple overnights where will you choose to go there will be new opportunities to experience the people places and cultures our planet has to offer in the supersonic gauge the world will quite literally feel smaller a donor heart could find
its way to recipient five thousand miles away Sydney Australia will feel as accessible as Hawaii is today world leaders when they have differences could gather in the same room to resolve them I children might get to know their grandpa now I must hasten to say this is hard and we still have many challenges ahead but I'm inspired to go to work everyday precisely because the mission
is big that we're working on something that will add to the sum of human progress something that governments a multinational corporations have been able to do we are often told as entrepreneurs as individuals I think globally but acted locally find a small piece of a big problem which is possible for us to take on but what if this is bad advice what if the truth is
that individuals and start ups to take on big missions of actually succeed what if the bigger the more additions to more inspiring the mission actually the greater the odds of success and a key idea big ideas attract great people boom we've been able to build an amazing team from places like space tax virgin galactic engulfed very precisely because we're working on something big and inspiring and
with those kinds of people a challenge that might seem intractable suddenly becomes possible even likely internally at boom we call our first airplane model a because it's the first step in a long series of aircraft over time we're gonna build larger airplanes that are more advanced and more fuel efficient further driving down the cost of speed I believe in a future where we can get anywhere
