Boom Times Ahead: Philip Liang on Why Supersonic Flight Will Make a Comeback

A month after the maiden flight of the XB-1 aircraft, Philip Angus Liang of venture-capital firm E15 VC tells Prestige why supersonic flight deserves a second chance.

It’s not every day you get to pick the brains of someone who was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and its famed Media Lab at the age of just 15, so when I called Philip Angus Liang, founder of the Hong Kong-based venture-capital firm E15 VC, our conversation naturally began with where he discovered his passion for deep tech. 

“I’ve always loved science and engineering,” he explains after telling me his car-registration plate has the same number and code as the USS Enterprise in Star Trek (though when I, a Star Wars loyalist, ask him which franchise he prefers, he replies, “Why pick sides?”). For a while, he designed cars at the MIT Media Lab alongside some of the biggest names in the industry, including Frank Gehry, Wayne Cherry and William J Mitchell. He’s also started and sold a few companies, though it wasn’t long until he decided to change careers.

“Eventually I switched over to becoming an investor, because at some point I realised that I’m just not as good a scientist or engineer as some of these other people,” he says with a smile. “In some ways I’d rather back these visionaries and help them with their vision when they need me. At the end of the day, I’m not a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, I’m not going to be the greatest engineer, but I still found a way to work with these people.”

Of course, as a top decision-maker for his venture-capital firm who’s entrusted with a significant amount of money from other investors, “these people” can’t just be anyone. For Liang, what makes a scientist, engineer or tech visionary great requires the perfect storm.

“There’s a very unique characteristic in people where they’re both incredibly optimistic but also extremely grounded in reality,” he explains. “It’s a rare trait, because most people are either one or the other. A lot of people are very knowledgeable, but they’ll kill all their projects off because their pessimism tells them Concorde failed, so this is never going to work.

“Then you’ve got the super-optimists, who think someone else is working on a project and those people will figure it out, so they’ll just throw a bunch of money at it, and that’s also never going to work. The person who has both traits and is well-balanced is the type of partner we’re looking for.”

If that’s the case, then Boom Supersonic’s founder and CEO Blake Scholl must have fallen into that rare category. With the backing of E15 VC, the American company is working hard to bring back supersonic flight through its full-scale Overture plane, and companies such as United Airlines, American Airlines and Japan Airlines have already signed up. In late March, Boom’s third-scale prototype XB-1 took its maiden flight, and the company is hoping to push it beyond Mach 1 in forthcoming tests. 

“It’s evolving very quickly at this point,” Liang says with triumph. “They’ve got a full-scale factory that’s almost complete, and a lot of progress has been made in the last few months. You need to remember these aren’t guys who’ve never built a plane before. Outside of Blake, Troy Follak was the chief engineer for Gulfstream and was responsible for the G600 and G650 programmes. These are guys who know what they’re doing.”

The ball might be rolling now, perhaps at a speed beyond the sound barrier, but Liang had a very different take in the beginning. Concorde, after all, took a stab at this in the 1960s, and we all know how that ended. “I was sceptical at first about Boom, very sceptical,” he says. “It took a really open mind when I spoke to the team to break down that first principle I had and get on board with their vision. It’s a very ambitious goal and there’s a lot of people out there who are going to laugh at this, but frankly that’s OK.”

Almost every technological advance that’s revolutionised the world has had naysayers, nonbelievers and haters. But, as Taylor Swift sings, “haters gonna hate” – and it’s with this attitude that Liang jets forward as a pioneer. 

“The reality is that Concorde failed because it was ahead of its time,” he explains. “It was actually profitable running from London to New York. What really killed it was the fact that it was using 50-year-old engines – which had no spare parts available any more – in a 50-year-old frame. What people get wrong about Boom is that the focus isn’t necessarily on long-haul flights like Hong Kong to New York, because premium passengers may already have a bed in a conventional flight and it’s comfortable enough. The exciting part is going from Hong Kong to Tokyo in under two hours. You can take a 6am flight, get there by 8am, have your business meeting and spend a day there, take the 9pm flight back, arrive at 11pm and be in bed by midnight. These are the possibilities it opens up.”

That said, Liang also understands the need to heed warnings, and he’s well aware his confidence mustn’t become arrogance. “The key thing is to be humble and also listen to the sceptics,” he adds, though from what I can gather it doesn’t seem as if his faith in supersonic air travel will falter any time soon.

“What people don’t understand about innovation today is timing,” he says. “We spent thousands of years being cavemen, and then we advanced a little bit because of the printing press. We had unified language first, and the printing press allowed us to spread the knowledge, but the process of getting there took us tens of millennia. Compare this to the fact that we went from powered flight to getting to the Moon in a single generation – some 70-odd years. 

“They think of Concorde as a failure, but the reality is that it was actually a limited success. It was just far too ahead of its time.”