One of Boom Supersonic’s first airline customers has said publicly that its airliner will miss its date. United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby, speaking on a podcast episode released October 28, said of the Overture timeline that 2029 is their official timeline but it is not going to happen in 2029, and that Boom still has a lot of hurdles to overcome in developing the aircraft and getting it certified by the FAA. Kirby praised Boom chief executive Blake Scholl in the same remarks, which makes the timeline judgement harder to dismiss as hostility.
The doubt lands while Boom’s centre of gravity shifts to power. On October 22 the company unveiled Sprint Core, the first complete prototype core of the turbine that will power both Superpower, its 42 megawatt natural gas turbine for AI data centres, and Symphony, the engine for Overture. It also opened a Superpower Superfactory in Centennial, Colorado, a nearly 200,000 square foot, 150 million dollar campus already making turbine parts, targeting first customer deliveries in mid 2027, annual production of 1 gigawatt, 25 turbines, by 2028 and 2 gigawatts, 50 turbines, by 2029, with up to 500 jobs. The core, carrying more than 1,000 sensors, is due a first firing before Thanksgiving.
The power business has its own credibility gap to close. Crusoe, the data centre developer that signed a 1.25 billion dollar order for 29 Superpower units as launch customer, walked away in September, choosing aircraft engine derived turbines from GE Vernova instead; Scholl acknowledged the loss and said Boom would deliver about 250 megawatts of Superpower units next year to other sites he did not name. No replacement launch customer has been announced.
Boom frames the two ventures as complementary: turbine revenue and test hours fund and de risk the supersonic engine. The United comment tests the other reading, that a company with a dormant airliner factory, an uncertified engine and a turbine whose first customer chose an incumbent is running two hard programmes on one balance sheet. The first firing of Sprint Core, due within weeks, is the next verifiable milestone for either version.