Concorde was supposed to revolutionize long-haul travel. But despite its promise, the elegant supersonic aircraft never managed to become cheap enough for regular flights.

Now, almost half a century after Concorde first took to the skies, cloud-powered supersonic planes could make air travel faster, cheaper and safer than ever before.

“What we’re doing here at Boom is picking up where Concorde left off, building an aircraft that flies faster by factor two than anything you can get a ticket on today and yet is 75 times more affordable than Concorde was,” said Blake Scholl (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Boom Technology Inc., which does business as Boom Supersonic.

Scholl spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how Boom is using the AWS cloud to iterate faster, creating a more efficient, safer supersonic aircraft that’s cheaper to produce and fly. (* Disclosure below.)

Born in the cloud to fly in the cloud

New technology has made aircraft research and development a completely different process than when the Concorde was designed. Physically, high-tensile, lightweight carbon fiber has replaced aluminum. And loud inefficient after-burning turbo jets have become quiet, clean and efficient turbo fans. But one of the most interesting breakthroughs has been the ability to trial versions digitally versus physically, according to Scholl.

“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,” he said. “On our XB-1 aircraft, which is our prototype that rolled out in October, we did hundreds of iterations of the design in virtual wind tunnels.”

The ability to spin up a simulation via a high-performance computing cluster on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud gave Boom the flexibility to experiment virtually in thousands of flight scenarios. By discarding the losers and continuing to iterate on the winners, the company was able to create a design that is efficient at high speed for traveling safely and quickly in a straight line, while also very smooth and controllable for safe takeoff and landing.

“Part of the art of supersonic airplane design is to accomplish both of those things in one airplane,” Scholl said.

Predictive maintenance for safer planes

Cloud will continue to play a role throughout the life of every airplane made by Boom’s fledgling production company Overture, according to Scholl.

“Digital instrumentation all over the airplane is going to update to the cloud,” he said. “[So] if something is running a little bit hot, if something is vibrating more than it should vibrate, you catch these things way before they’re any kind of real maintenance issue.”

The rollout of the XB-1 prototype marked the first new supersonic civil aircraft since the Soviet Tupolev Tu-144 in 1968. And it’s all thanks to the AWS cloud, according to Scholl.

“We were able to do it as a startup because of computing,” he said. “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.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE