Boom Supersonic builds as fast as it flies

Concorde carried the last supersonic passengers in 2003, confined by its own sonic boom to ocean routes whose economics never came together. Boom believes the math finally works, and its XB-1 demonstrator has already flown past the speed of sound without a boom reaching the ground. The plan is to carry passengers again before the end of the decade.

A clean-sheet airliner is a challenge most airframers scope down by buying their engines from a specialist, but Boom is building both Overture, the airliner, and Symphony, the engine that powers it. Owning both means the airplane and the engine are designed together and refined against each other, which is nearly impossible when the two live at different companies.

Building an airplane and its engine at once, on that schedule, means Boom can’t work the way the industry usually does. Much of aerospace still runs on tools and habits that have barely changed since the 1990s, with long stretches of upfront planning and slow handoffs from one specialist to the next.

So the team borrowed from software. Every engineer is expected to code, and software engineers sit alongside the hardware teams rather than in a separate world, sharing what they learn and finding the places where software can carry some of the load. They work in short cycles, build early, and get something real into their hands as quickly as they can, because a part you can hold teaches you more than a part you can only model.

Linear is where that way of working holds together. The whole company plans in one place, where anyone can look across team lines and see how their piece fits into the airplane taking shape around it.

And the tool itself is quick, the way they have to be.