Boom Supersonic: Erin Fisher Young ’09 and Megan Young ’97

There’s just something about planes,” according to Erin Fisher Young ’09, whose experiences on a Colorado Academy Middle School Interim trip to Space Camp at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kan., first seeded her passion for flight.

As Senior Manager of Aircraft Systems with Denver-based Boom Supersonic, Erin has seen those Middle School dreams transformed into every day’s amazing reality. The ten-year-old company, which as a fledgling startup hired Erin to be its tenth employee—and first female engineer—in early 2025 celebrated a historic milestone. Boom’s experimental aircraft, the XB-1, sustained flight in excess of Mach 1.1 in multiple test runs within the Supersonic Corridor over Mojave Air & Space Port in California, becoming the first civil supersonic jet made in America to break the sound barrier. And it did so without generating a sonic “boom” audible from the ground, a huge technical achievement that clears the way for production of Boom’s supersonic airliner, Overture.

But Erin is not the only CA graduate to be a part of Boom’s mission to bring back commercial supersonic flight more than 20 years after the retirement of the British-French Concorde. Megan Young ’97 is Boom’s Senior Vice President for Product Marketing and Customers, ensuring Overture meets the needs of the company’s airline partners and provides a product experience beloved by passengers.

Together, the two women have helped to pave the way for the company’s continued progress toward accessible supersonic air travel that will, in the vision of Boom founder and CEO, Blake Scholl, enable new possibilities for global business, cultural discovery, and human connection. Boom’s Overture airliner, due to make its debut in 2029 in the fleets of leading international carriers, will travel at Mach 1.7 and incorporate technologies such as carbon fiber composites, digital stability augmentation, and an augmented reality vision system for landing visibility as it nearly halves flying time between major world destinations.

Megan, who loved math and science at CA and even thought of becoming an engineer, recalls like Erin, “The most impactful experiences for me as a CA student were the trips—to Mazatlán, Mexico for Seventh Grade Spanish and to Costa Rica in high school. Being at a company that is literally transforming how we will travel and experience the world and how people learn and interact with other cultures—that is what makes Boom special for me.”

 

‘THINK BIGGER’

Boom Supersonic is not your typical aerospace engineering startup, and neither Megan nor Erin pursued typical paths to find themselves at the visionary company, recently featured in the Wall Street Journal as offering the first real promise to speed up air travel in half a century.

“Think bigger” is one of Boom’s core values, notes Megan. “It is a unique place that’s looking to bring together people who think differently and aren’t just from aviation or aerospace.”

Erin brings her perspective as a female engineer in an overwhelmingly male-dominated field, a place she arrived after being encouraged by CA’s College Office to pursue her BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. Since earning her degree, she has held various leadership positions in the Rocky Mountain Section of the Society of Women Engineers, leading STEM events for students in the community to learn about aerospace and aviation.

“Once I started taking aerospace classes, I realized I really loved the aviation side of the field. Compared to orbital dynamics, where you learn to position a satellite, planes are just incredibly interesting: how they fly, how they stay in the air, what you can accomplish with them.” Erin even obtained her pilot’s license, a precursor to landing a role designing flight control systems for the military-focused Scorpion Jet at Textron Aviation. She joined Boom, she says, because of the way its unique mission and small team set it apart from the major players in aviation such as the Department of Defense or Boeing.

“Big organizations operate slowly, making incremental progress, and their engineers only ever work on tiny pieces of a much larger puzzle. Boom has a mission to fundamentally change the space, allowing my colleagues and me to really dig into something that we care about.”

As Megan echoes, “One of the things that I loved about CA was exploring many different areas: sports every single trimester, choir, the arts. I got to take risks, which is something that applies to my professional career as well.” With degrees in Marketing and Spanish for the Professions from the University of Colorado Boulder, Megan has worked in marketing at large Fortune 500 companies and counts launching the global expansion of Oral-B toothpaste in Latin America, Europe, and Asia as one of her big professional wins.

And now she’s taking on another exciting challenge. “Coming to a startup like Boom gave me the opportunity to own all aspects of marketing from product development to communications, as well as lean into new areas like defining and designing the passenger experience.”

“Working for a small company, especially one with such big goals and a big mission, gives you so much more ownership,” adds Erin. “There’s no shortage of opportunities that you can take on and learn from and be responsible for. Your path isn’t so narrow in a startup organization, and that can be very exciting. Like CA, you can try a wide variety of things until you find what fits you best, and then really dive in.”

‘SWEET SPOT’

“Staying curious” is how both women describe the mindset that brought them together at Boom. For Erin, that meant getting up to her elbows in the engineering that allows XB-1, and eventually Overture, to take advantage of what’s known as Mach “cutoff,” in which precise, real-time calculation of airspeed and altitude in relation to atmospheric conditions makes any sonic boom refract inaudibly.

Her next big challenge after XB-1 is Boom’s Symphony engine, a purpose-built turbofan optimized for Overture’s supersonic flight. With Erin directing ongoing hardware testing, the first full-scale engine core will be operational around the end of 2025. “You learn so much more through testing,” she says. “How viable in real life is that design we came up with on a computer?”

Taking “baby steps” toward a final product is the philosophy behind Boom’s iterative testing process, Erin notes. “Flexibility in a test program is essential. We have built a team that deals well with ambiguity. It enables us to pivot and refocus when something doesn’t go quite as expected. This is a rare balance of a highly rigorous approach and a flexible mindset.”

“Rigorous” and “flexible” perfectly describe the atmosphere both Erin and Megan thrived in through CA’s Upper School curriculum. “My teachers encouraged me to pursue all kinds of things they thought I might be interested in, even if I eventually decided that wasn’t where I wanted to spend my time,” recalls Erin. “For a while, I thought I was going to focus on creative writing.”

For Megan, it was her teachers’ and advisors’ support for risk taking that paid the biggest dividends. “Try it” was their constant refrain, she remembers. “You may not be the best at it, but we’re going to give you the opportunity to try it.”

Those two qualities—rigor and flexibility—define the company’s philosophy about refining its technology while discovering how to make the best product possible. The same combination provided the model for building the company itself.

“XB-1 not only proved our engineering team’s capability,” Erin explains, “but it also demonstrated that we could hire and grow an organization to take an aircraft from design to successful flight test. Along the way was everything we learned from an engineering perspective, but more deeply everything we learned from the perspective of who we want to be as a company, and how we will make the leap to the next aircraft, which is going to be another order of magnitude more difficult.”

 

Boom’s ability to thrive on complexity mirrors that marriage of engineering and organizational proficiency.

“We think about the development of Overture along three different vectors,” says Megan. “There’s the technical feasibility—creating a supersonic jet that can go fast but also meet noise standards for takeoff, landing, and flight. There’s the economic viability—ensuring that it is profitable and sustainable for our airline customers. And then there’s the desirability of the product—creating a product that is inspiring to our passengers, beloved, enduring. Finding that sweet spot has been our journey as a company.”

And finding the sweet spot, Megan goes on, has required much more than just technical or marketing chops. “We want our designers to think like engineers and our engineers to think like designers,” she says. “They need to work together every step of the way.” That allows considerations such as safety, a core Boom value, to stay front and center in every design decision or test plan.

Even the video livestream that she orchestrated for XB-1’s barrier-breaking test flights, Megan notes, forced employees to cross conventional organizational boundaries—again, an essential part of CA’s Upper School curriculum, where students focusing on science and math are pushed to discover unexpected passions in writing, the arts, or athletics.

Being able to translate half-formed thoughts into articulate, persuasive writing wasn’t just the province of Anne Strobridge’s English classroom, both recall. It was a huge differentiator for CA and for each of them in their careers.

“My marketing team literally embedded ourselves in the flight test team with Erin,” adds Megan, “so that we could understand the program from the ground up, not just as an afterthought. We were part of the technical and safety briefings, trying to imagine the risks and how we would communicate them to viewers. Conveying this huge event to the world—our customers and investors—was just as critical to the company’s mission as getting the plane past Mach 1.”

ADVANCING AVIATION

With that milestone behind them, Megan and Erin are celebrating yet another sign of progress: In May, based largely on the results of Boom’s successful XB-1 flight tests, legislation known as the “Supersonic Modernization Act” was introduced in Congress, and on June 6, President Trump issued an executive order to remove regulatory barriers hindering supersonic flight in the United States, effectively lifting a 52-year ban on civil supersonic flight over land.

 

“Advances in aerospace engineering, materials science, and noise reduction now make supersonic flight not just possible, but safe, sustainable, and commercially viable,” reads the executive order, virtually paraphrasing Boom’s press releases about XB-1 and Overture.

Says Megan, “Regulation had been holding aviation back.” Consider the vast leaps in power and speed that have propelled other technologies—Apple’s iPhone, for example—in recent decades. “But with this new movement in legislation, we believe it will make a dramatic impact in driving more innovation and continuing to advance aviation in the U.S.”

All it took, this alumna and now mom of rising CA Sixth and Third Graders notes, was staying curious, “continuing to ask questions rather than accepting the status quo.” No surprise, then, that SpaceX is frequently mentioned in news coverage of Boom’s successes. “Our philosophies are similar: Go fast, learn by doing, lean into failure, but most of all, keep questioning.”

This is the crux of innovation today, Megan observes. As a Fifth Grader, her son completed his Voices of Change capstone—a culmination that asks students to team up to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges—using a Design Thinking approach, an iterative process that involves understanding needs, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, prototyping, and testing. In the same way, iteration in imagining what an aviation company looks like shaped Boom, accelerating it to the forefront of the next era in global travel.

“It is not enough to know the surface-level stuff, the existing standards and processes,” emphasizes Erin. “Yes, there is a deep level of knowledge engineers need to possess, but it is so much more than that. It is understanding the ‘Why?’ behind every decision or procedure. If you’re asking ‘Why?’ a lot, then you’re gaining real understanding that allows you to determine whether there’s a better way.”

Erin insists she isn’t describing recklessness. “Safety is core to the company for very good reason: Ours is a passenger-focused mission. But we could be the safest company in the world and take no risk, and then we’d never fly anything. So we have to find the right balance—take measured risks, intelligent risks, at each incremental step, learn something, and then build that into the next iteration.”

Observes Megan, “It is very much like the CA model. After every day, every test, we ask ourselves, ‘What did we learn from this? How will we stretch the envelope next time?’”

Pure engineering is only part of the equation. Going faster than anyone else also requires courage: to wonder, to dare, and even to start over, again and again. With two CA graduates leading the way, it’s no surprise that Boom just keeps accelerating.