When British Airways retired its Concorde fleet in 2003, few imagined that would be the demise of supersonic passenger travel for the foreseeable future. However, one man refused to accept it and has been striving to make his dream a reality since 2014, when he founded U.S. supersonic aircraft manufacturer Boom.

Blake Scholl’s vision to restore supersonic travel and make it both commercially viable and luxurious has been regarded by many as pie in the sky. However, his critics have been eating their words as the Boom’s demonstrator aircraft went supersonic four times in January 2025 to prove his concept.

Blake has always been interested in aviation and earned his private pilot’s license in 2008. However, his early career began as a software engineer with Amazon, eventually selling a small company to Groupon followed by multiple leadership roles with Groupon. He was inspired to start Boom after seeing Concorde in a museum and wondering why aviation had taken such a step backward with no contenders to replace the iconic aircraft. General wisdom said that supersonic travel was no longer financially viable, but Blake refused to accept that modern technology could not be applied to overcome the issues.

Blake decided to educate himself and “bought every textbook I could find, I took remedial calculus and physics classes along with an aeronautical design class. I started building a spreadsheet model of the airplane and the market.” This led him to believe that you could develop existing Boeing 787 technology and apply it to supersonic travel.

Using a carbon composite airframe and making it long and thin, you would need to put in twice as many engines. The aircraft should then be able to go twice as fast and reduce the cost of flying supersonic by about three-quarters, which was the major problem with Concorde.

Confident he had found a way forward, in 2014 he founded Boom.

Blake’s vision includes keeping pricing broadly in line with existing business class fares rather than Concorde, which was priced at first class levels “for rockstars and royalty”, beyond the reach of most people.

He expects the price for New York to London to be around $3,500 per ticket to break even, giving an expected fare of around $5,000. There are also plans for future models of their aircraft, Overture, to bring costs down even lower and be within reach of the average traveler.

He is also focused on ensuring that the onboard experience is as comfortable as possible, compared to Concorde’s seats which were more like something from a low-cost airline. Most airline manufacturers outsource their seating, but Boom is keen to keep this in-house and has a small team working on the designs.

Due to the shorter flights, there are no plans to include flatbeds, keeping costs and the aircraft’s weight down. With 64 seats, there is a dedicated baggage space for every seat so you don’t need to worry about boarding late and not finding room.

For now, Blake is keeping tight-lipped about the exact designs but promises something unexpected to wow customers. Passengers will also enjoy views of the earth from the edge of space as Boom will cruise and climb like Concorde up to an altitude of around 60,000ft. 

Overture will still be fuel intensive like Concorde, needing around double the fuel of conventional aircraft, but that just intensifies Boom’s desire to make aviation more sustainable. Most modern aircraft can only use around 50% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) whereas Overture will be built to run on 100% SAF.

Currently, SAF is too expensive and in too short supply to be viable for mass supply. However, Blake believes that Boom may help increase the supply of SAF as they can support the additional cost due to passengers being willing to pay a premium for a supersonic flight. 

Blake has faced numerous setbacks along the way, such as finding out that the required airframe was 2000 lbs overweight when they were already halfway through building it. Each time under his leadership, the Boom team kept going until they found the solution. All the trials and tribulations finally felt worth it when Boom went supersonic for the first time. Blake says “I was watching the live stream and we watched the Mach number tick over to more than one, which was one of the greatest moments in my life.”  Not content with achieving what many people believed was impossible to bring back commercial supersonic flight, Blake is even more ambitious and plans to train to fly their supersonic aircraft. 

Part of the commercial viability of Boom is down to its “Boomless” technology. While Concorde created a supersonic boom that limited its supersonic travel to being over water, Boom has found a solution to the issue.

In the six times they broke the sound barrier recently, the demonstrator did not create a single supersonic boom. Overture’s autopilot will continuously optimize speed for Boomless Cruise based on atmospheric conditions. Boomless Cruise is possible at speeds up to Mach 1.3, with typical speed between Mach 1.1 and 1.2. Once over the water where the sonic boom is not an issue, speeds of Mach 1.7 will be achieved.

With the Boomless Cruise, speeds are 40-50% faster than conventional airliners, which means a flight from New York to Los Angeles can be up to 90 minutes shorter. With a flight time of around 4 hours and the time difference, you can arrive only an hour after departure, local time. The longest the aircraft can fly continuously is around 4250nm, equivalent to around nine hours flying time at conventional speeds. However, longer flights such as Australia would be possible with a refueling stop, similar to how airlines operate today. It is hoped that the future generation of the aircraft will have an even longer range. 

Boom is working on a fairly short timeframe for delivering aircraft that Blake believes will carry fare-paying passengers within the next five years, with 2029 being the expected launch date. Production on the first aircraft will start in around 18 months with the first test flight expected in 2028.

The aircraft manufacturer already has 130 orders and pre-orders from multiple airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Air. It is interesting that the original operators of Concorde, Air France and British Airways, have not yet formally expressed an interest. Still, Blake is confident that once the concept is proven with firm orders, most major airlines will have to offer supersonic travel to compete. 

While the concept of supersonic aircraft may seem like a hugely costly endeavor, Blake believes in keeping team sizes small for both working together efficiently and keeping costs low. Due to this method of working, he believes that the company will break even by 2030, which is impressive so soon after the commercial launch of the aircraft.

The recent supersonic flights not only proved Blake’s critics wrong, but also culminated many years of hard work to make his long-held dream take flight. Blake Scholl’s unwavering vision and desire to do things differently may lead to Boom being as revolutionary to aircraft as Apple was to mobile phones. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Tech leaders are sounding the alarm that within months, AI will be doing all new coding and programming—but there’s conflict when it comes to timing and impact.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had a bold prediction this week that could kill thousands of jobs in software development, an industry that has historically boasted of record growth.

In just three to six months, AI will be writing 90% of all the code produced, Amodei tells the Council on Foreign Relations. “In 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.”

Programmers will still need to be around to dictate specific conditions, parameters, and goals, but he says that too may soon be outsourced to technology.

“As long as there are these small pieces that a human programmer needs to do—(that) the AI isn’t good at—I think human productivity will actually be enhanced,” Amodei says. “But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems.” 

While he adds that AI will eventually be able to do everything humans can, not all is lost. It will usher in an era of deep thinking on how to make human capital the most resourceful.

“We need to think about usefulness and uselessness in a different way than we have before,” he says. “Our current way of thinking has not been tenable.”

However, not everyone agrees with Amodei’s stark assessment.

Even CEOs are divided on the impact of AI on the tech industry

IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna has a more conservative outlook, telling a crowd at SXSW on Tuesday that he disagrees with Amodei’s timeline and result.

“I think the number is going to be more like 20-30% of the code could get written by AI—not 90%” Krishna says. 

There are simple use cases where, yes, automated programming makes sense, but there is an equally complicated number where it doesn’t make sense, he adds. 

Krishna is also bullish when it comes to programmers. Because AI can dramatically scale up a programmer’s productivity, it can lead to even greater company gains.

“History has shown that the most productive company gains market share, and then you can provide more products, which lets you get more market share,” he says. 

Mark Zuckerberg has expressed a similar sentiment. In an earnings call in January, he said that 2025 would be the year a software engineering AI agent will have “coding and problem-solving abilities of around a good mid-level engineer.” Though dramatic change may not happen until next year, he hopes Meta is the company that will be able to usher in the innovation.

At Google, more than 25% of the company’s new code is already being produced by AI, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. 

However, Google is one of several big names in tech that have had a recent massive shedding of their workforce. Intel and Tesla are also among those that have cut over 10,000 employees in the last two years. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the field of software development will grow by 17% between 2023 and 2033.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Conflict, infidelity, and lack of intimacy are some of the top causes of divorce. But new data compiled by Divorce.com, shared with Fortune ahead of its publication on the website, shows another factor: a woman being the main breadwinner. 

Regardless of whether the household has one or two incomes, a female main earner in a heterosexual marriage is associated with a divorce rate that is three times higher (31 vs. 11 per 1,000) than marriages with a man who earns more. 

Further, in single-income homes with female breadwinners, the divorce rate is twice as high (54 vs. 20 per 1,000). 

Female breadwinners, the findings continue, represent just 16% of all households—but account for 42% of divorces, “highlighting a significant imbalance.”

The data is based on the 212,000 respondents of the Census’s American Community Survey from between 2012 and 2023, all of whom had filed for divorce at the time of the survey. It was collected from all 50 states, included respondents from 18 to 99, and reflected U.S. income distribution, with 75% reporting income below $100,000 ad 11% reporting incomes above $150,000. 

The pattern appears to have held for over a decade, as data from 2013 shows female earners accounting for 41% of divorcing households while only making up 17% of all U.S. households. 

That’s when University of Chicago professor of economics Marianne Bertrand co-wrote a working paper exploring the topic. She saw the divorce-rate gap as a grim societal reality, as a woman outearning her husband was found to cause unhappiness in a relationship, she found, and even “doom” the marriage. 

“The notion that a man should earn more than his wife not only impacts marriage rates, the researchers show, but also influences how much a married woman works outside the home and how household chores are divided,” a press release on the research noted. “Moreover, women who deviate from that norm pay a social price.” 

Divorce.com CEO and founder Liz Pharo, though, believes that such a divorce gap could be evidence of empowerment. 

“In previous generations, success for women was usually measured by marriage and family stability, but today, career achievements and personal fulfillment outside of traditional roles are more central,” Pharo tells Fortune. “Women are no longer financially dependent on their partners, which means they’re more willing to leave unsatisfied marriages instead of staying out of necessity.”

The finding is not even uniquely American, as a 2024 data analysis of couples in France found that, all other things being equal, “couples in which the woman’s share of the couple’s total income is higher than 55% are significantly more unstable than other couples. They are from 11 to 40% more at risk of union dissolution than equal-income couples, and the risk of union dissolution increases with the woman’s share of couple’s total income.”

In the U.S., the share of married women who were earning at least as much as their husbands had more than tripled in the past five decades as of 2023, Pew Research found. Husbands, it discovered, were the breadwinners in 55% of marriages, while 29% of couples were earning about the same and 16% earned more than their spouse. 

“Women are gaining economic influence within their marriages,” Carolina Aragão, a Pew research associate and author on that research, told Fortune at the time. 

But despite sometimes earning more than their husbands, Pew found, married women spent more of their downtime on childcare and household chores than the men, with one exception: when the woman was the sole breadwinner.  

That imbalance could also play a role. 

“Modern women have higher expectations for emotional and personal fulfillment in relationships, leading to a lower tolerance for unhealthy or imbalanced partnerships,” says Pharo. “Divorce isn’t as stigmatized as it once was. Women, especially those who are financially independent, feel more empowered to walk away from marriages that don’t serve their emotional wellbeing.”

More on relationships:

• Financial disagreements are a strong predictor of divorce. These 2 tips can help you talk about money with your partner
• Conflict with your partner can have long-lasting effects on your health. Here’s how to have better disagreements
• The longest, healthiest marriages have these 6 defining traits 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com