>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 live I'm Lisa Martin. Really exciting topic coming up for you next, please. Welcome Blake shoulda, 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 going to talk about in the next few minutes or so, but supersonic flight has existed for quite a long time, like 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, a supersonic flight has >> actually been around since 1949 when Chuck Yeager broke the speed barrier or sorry, the sound barrier. >>And as, as many of you know, he actually passed yesterday, uh, 97. So very, very sad to see one of the supersonic pioneers behind us. Uh, but, uh, but as I say goodbye to Jaeger, 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, uh, we used to make regular progress and speed. As we went from, uh, the horse to the iron horse, to the, the boats, to the, the early propeller airplanes that have 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. Uh, we haven't had a world war since the Dawn of the jet age. Uh, places like Hawaii have become, uh, a major tourist destination. >>Uh, but today, uh, today it's been 60 years since we've had a mainstream re uh, step forward and speed. So what we're doing here at boom is picking up where Concord left off building an aircraft that flies faster by factor to the, anything you can get a ticket on today. And yet is 75% more affordable than Concorde was. So we want to make Australia as accessible as a why yesterday. We want to enable you to cross 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, so interesting that you, you want to make this more accessible. And I did see the news about Chuck Yeager last night. >>Um, 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 and AWS to help facilitate that. Right. Well, so one of the really fascinating things is the new generation of airplanes, uh, are getting born in the cloud and then they're going to go fly through actual clouds. And so there are, there are a bunch of revolutions in technology that have happened since Concord's time that are enabling what we're doing now, their breakthroughs and materials. We've gone from aluminum to carbon fiber they're breakthroughs and 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 in a available to do design digitally and iteration digitally versus, uh, versus physically. >>So when conquer 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, uh, on our XP one aircraft, which is our prototype that rolled out in October. Um, uh, we did hundreds of iterations of the design in virtual wind tunnels, where we could spin up a, uh, a simulation and HPC cluster in AWS, often more than 500 cores. And then we'd have our airplanes flying through virtual wind tunnels, thousands of flights scenarios you can figure out which were the losers, which were the winners keep iterating on the winners. And you arrive at an aerodynamic design that is more efficient at high speed. We're going very safely, very quickly in a straight line, but also a very smooth controllable for safe takeoff and landing. And the part of the artist supersonic airplane design is to accomplish both of those things. One, one airplane, and, uh, being able to design in the cloud, the cloud allows us to start up to do what previously only governments and militaries could do. I mentioned we rolled out our XP one 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 the cloud to fly in the cloud. So talk to me about a lot of, of opportunity that technology has really accelerated. And we've seen a lot of acceleration this year in particular digital transformation 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 has dramatic change over 12, uh, when tone test for the Concord and how many times did it, >>Uh, I mean for 27 years, but not that many flights, never, it never changed the way mainstream, uh, never, never district some of you and I fly. Right. Um, so, so how, how are we going all in? So we've, you know, we've been using AWS for, uh, you know, basically since the founding of the company. Uh, but what we, what we're doing now is taking things that we were doing outside of the cloud and cloud. Uh, as an example, uh, we have 525 terabytes of XP one design and test data that what used to be backed up offsite. Um, and, and what we're doing is migrating into the cloud. And then your data is next. Your compute, you can start to do these really interesting things as an example, uh, 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 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, you know, design manufacturing, but also other areas like the beyond onboard experience, which I'm already really excited to be participating in in the next few years. >>Yeah. So there's so many, so many examples. We've talked about design a little bit already. Uh, it's going to manifest in the manufacturing process, uh, where the, the, the, the, the supply chain, uh, will be totally digital. The factory operations will be run out of the cloud. You know, so what that means concretely is, uh, you know, literally there'll be like a million parts of this airplane. And for any given unit goes through their production line, you'll instantly know where they all are. Um, you'll know which serial numbers went on, which airplanes, uh, you'll understand, uh, if there was a problem with one of it, how you fixed it. And as you continue to iterate and refine the airplane, this, this is one of things that's actually a big deal, uh, with, with digital in the cloud is, you know, exactly what design iteration went into, exactly which airplane and, uh, and that allows you to actually iterate faster and any given airline with any given airplane will actually know exactly what, 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, uh, it allows you to spot bottlenecks in your supply chain before they impact production. Um, and then it allows you to, uh, to do preventive maintenance later. So there's to be digital interpretation all over the airplane, it's going to update the cloud on, you know, uh, are the engines running expected temperature. So I'm gonna run a little bit hot, is something vibrating more than it should vibrate. And so you catch these things way before there's any kind of real maintenance issue. You flag it in the cloud. 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, to have a hundred percent visibility into manufacturing design, everything is kind of an understatement, but you launched XQ on your prototype 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, reinventing this year, virtual, what were some of the, the, the advantages that you got, being able to stay on track and imagine if you were on track to launch in October during a time that has been so chaotic, uh, everywhere else, including air travel. >>Well, some of it's very analog, uh, and some of it's very digital. So to start with the analog, uh, we took COVID really seriously at Bo. Uh, we went into that, the pandemic first hit, we shut the company down for a couple of weeks, so we'd kind of get our feet underneath of us. And then we sort of testing, uh, 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. Um, and I'm super proud that we're able to stay productive and stay safe during the pandemic. Um, and you do that, but kind of taking it seriously, doing common sense things. And then there's the digital effort. And, uh, and so, you know, 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. >>Uh, we have more people in the office cause we, we still really do value that in-person collaboration and which brings it back through 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, uh, what we've seen, you know, since the Dawn of the telephone is that it's actually been the opposite. The more you can know, somebody even a little bit, uh, at distance, the hungry you are to go see them in person, whether it's a business contact or someone you're in love with, um, 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 communication is ultimately going to be very, um, uh, it's very complimentary with supersonic because you can get to know somebody a little bit over a long distance. You can have some kinds of exchanges and then you're, and then the friction for be able to see them in person is going to drop. And that is, uh, 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 was 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 XB one 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 boom and the next year or two, are you on track for that 2025? >>Yeah. Things are going, things are going great. Uh, so to give a sense of what the next few years hold. So we rolled out the assembled XB one aircraft this year, uh, next year that's going to fly. And so that will be the first civil supersonic, uh, flying aircraft ever built by an independent company. Uh, and along the way, we are building the foundation of overture. So that design efforts happening now as XB one is breaking the sound barrier. We'll be finalizing the overture design in 22, we'll break ground in the factory in 23, we'll start building the first airplane and 25, we'll roll it out. And 26 we'll start flight tests. And, uh, and then we'll go through the flight test methodically, uh, systematically as carefully as we can, uh, and then be ready to carry passengers as soon as we are convinced that 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, this time hasn't derailed because you have the massive capabilities of, to be able to do all of the work that's necessary, way more than was done with before with the Concorde. And that you can do that remotely with cloud is 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, um, 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, uh, we look at the, the weights. Uh, we look at stability and control. We look at pilots, light aside, 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, uh, lines up a little bit differently with the rest now, for example, uh, uh, 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 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, how good of an actual 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, that iteration loop, that design cycle loop. And that's, that's part of where the cloud helps us. And we've, we've got some, uh, uh, 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 a, it gives you an instant report. I'm like, Oh, was it that this is a good change or bad change, uh, 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, accelerating your design iterations, uh, giving everyone of the team visibility into those. And then, uh, I think you get together in person as it makes sense to now we're actually hitting a major design milestone with over-treat this week and we're, COVID testing everybody and get them all in the same room. Cause sometimes that in-person collaboration, uh, is really significant, even though you can still do so much digitally. >>I totally agree. There's there's certain things that you just can't replicate. Last question since my brother is a pilot for Southwest and retired Lieutenant Colonel from the air force, any special training that pilots will have to have, or are there certain pilots that are going to be maybe lower hanging fruit, if they have military experience versus commercial flight? Just curious. >>Yeah. So our XB one aircraft is being flown by test pilots. There's one ex Navy one ex air force on our crew, but, uh, overture, uh, will be accessible to any commercial pilot. So, uh, think about it as if you're, if you're used to flying Boeing, it'd be like switching to Airbus, uh, or vice versa. So the, uh, Concord is a complicated aircraft to fly because they didn't have computers. And all the complexity, the soup of supersonic flight was right there and the pilots and an overture, all that gets extracted by software. And, uh, you know, the, the, the ways the flight controls change over speed regimes. You don't have to worry about it, but the airplane is handled beautifully, no matter what you're doing. And so, uh, and so there are many, many places to innovate, but actually pilot experience, not one of them, >>Because the more conventional you can make it for people like your brother, the easier it's going to be for them to learn the aircraft. And therefore the safer it's going to be to fly. I'll let them 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 20, 26, I'm going to be looking for my ticket. Awesome. Can't wait to have you on board. Likewise for Blake shul, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the QS live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.