“Supersonic airplane startup Boom has just completed a key step on the way to building a production supersonic passenger jet; the startup finished its wind tunnel testing, verifying its first two years of aerodynamic design work and setting the stage for building the airframe that will eventually become the basis of it first flight-ready aircraft. I spoke to Boom CEO and co-founder Blake Scholl about the completed wind tunnel testing, and asked why this was such a big step for the startup. Scholl explained that this was a key turning point because it meant being able to move on to building large-scale hardware for testing with human pilots, but he also explained that even just a few years ago, this kind of milestone would’ve involved repeated wind tunnel trials through multiple physical model iterations over a drawn-out period of time. It used to be you do all your development in wind tunnel,” Scholl explained. “Every iteration would take six months, cost millions – you’d better be a big company. But today, you can do aerodynamic development in simulation, where each iteration takes 30 minutes and costs almost nothing, and so you can do it with a tiny team. And then when you think you’ve got it right, you go to the wind tunnel and you verify rather than develop there.””