Boom is also developing its own engines for the Overture in conjunction with Kratos, which helped design turbines for the F-22 and F-35 fighters, after dropping plans to buy them off the shelf from Rolls-Royce.
Because they will be built to run for several hours at full thrust, unlike subsonic engines, operating and maintenance costs would be lower, Scholl said, “so the fares can come down and more people can fly supersonic”.
Together with opposition from the green lobby, the biggest hurdle for Boom may be its ability to continue raising capital, a lack of which led to the demise of Aerion after backers that had included Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Electric pulled out.
Scholl said the Overture, which has so far attracted $700m in funding, was a multibillion-dollar programme that must sustain investor and customer interest as each milestone passes.
Still, Boom stands out for its ambition in an industry where Boeing and Airbus last launched wholly new planes 20 years ago and do not plan to do so again until the mid-2030s.
Scholl said: “It’s clear to me that now’s the time. The legacy guys are going a whole generation without building anything new. Airline CEOs are saying they want something, passengers, you say supersonic and they hit the roof. People want this and they deserve it.
“There’s no guarantee of success here, but if we pull this off we’ll have built one of the most valuable companies on the planet.”
Mike Bannister, former chief pilot of the British Airways Concorde fleet, put the Overture through its paces on a simulator at the Farnborough International Airshow and said it represents an “unbelievable” level of progress for the industry that should not be suppressed.
He said: “People have always wanted to travel faster. That’s why we domesticated the horse 5,000 years ago, and why we invented the motor car, the plane and then the jet engine.
“Supersonic flight is an extension of that and there’s definitely a market. In business, speed and time are quite literally money, and in the leisure market people are increasingly willing to spend more on a premium flight. I’d like to see this happen.”
Scholl himself is adamant that technological gains must not be sacrificed on the altar of climate politics and that science, rather than abstinence, holds the key to reaching aviation’s target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
He said: “I want to have a future where we have more and better things for us as humans, and we make the world around us a place that we can enjoy even more.
“We can absolutely have that future. We just have to build it.”