In 2007, Blake Scholl, a twentysomething US software engineer from the early days of Amazon, climbed into a retired Concorde. “I remember thinking, why is this amazing machine not at an airport?” he tells me. He then put a Google alert on “supersonic flight” — wanting to be the first to know when he could buy a ticket.
Years went by and no alert came through. “Nobody was making any credible effort,” he says. “So I thought I would get into the research and realise there was a good reason that nobody was doing it.”
