Boom CEO Puts Up $100K Prize For First Amateur RC Airplane To Break Mach 1, Hours After Dorm-Built Jet Goes Viral

Boom Supersonic founder and CEO Blake Scholl announced a $100,000 prize, $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in Boom stock, for the first amateur-built RC airplane to exceed Mach 1. Scholl posted the challenge on X this morning, July 2, quote-tweeting the dorm-built jet drone that DroneXL covered just hours earlier.

“Boom will be offering a prize $50k cash and $50k in Boom stock for the first amateur-built RC airplane to exceed Mach 1,” Scholl wrote, above Tomas Salvo’s post claiming his 5 kg carbon-fiber Reaper hits 500 mph. The prize post collected 3,800 likes in under three hours.

From Dorm Room Post To Six-Figure Challenge In Half A Day

The sequence took roughly half a day. As DroneXL reported this morning, college student Tomas Salvo posted his homebuilt turbojet aircraft overnight, claiming the world’s fastest RC airplane. Scholl replied “Congrats, this is badass. DM me” overnight, and by mid-morning had turned his enthusiasm into an open-ended engineering bounty for the entire hobby.

Scholl knows the supersonic problem firsthand. Boom’s XB-1 demonstrator became the first privately developed civil aircraft to break the sound barrier in January 2025, and the company is building its Overture airliner around the promise of quiet supersonic flight. A prize aimed at amateurs follows a long aviation tradition: the Orteig Prize produced Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing, and the Ansari X Prize produced private spaceflight.

Mach 1 Is A Very Long Way From 500 MPH

The bar Scholl set is dramatically higher than anything an RC aircraft has verifiably done. Mach 1 at sea level is roughly 761 mph. The verified record for a jet-powered RC aircraft is Niels Herbrich‘s 465 mph, and the fastest RC aircraft of any kind, Spencer Lisenby’s unpowered dynamic-soaring glider, peaked at 548 mph. Even taking Salvo’s self-reported 500 mph at face value, Mach 1 demands more than 50% additional speed, into a regime where transonic drag, flutter, and control-latency problems multiply. That’s precisely the regime Boom spent years and an experimental aircraft program learning to handle.

The regulatory questions DroneXL raised this morning apply double at Mach 1. No US framework accommodates it: Part 107 caps at 100 mph, the AMA turbine program at 200 mph. A legitimate attempt would need the kind of sanctioned, cleared-airspace event one of Salvo’s collaborators says is already being planned in the Mojave Desert.

DroneXL’s Take

This is how you respond to viral engineering talent: not with a cease-and-desist about airspace rules, but with a prize that channels the energy somewhere legitimate. A Mach 1 attempt can’t happen from a college field. It needs cleared airspace, instrumentation, and organization, and a six-figure carrot pulls every garage builder chasing it toward exactly that infrastructure. Scholl gets a talent funnel and publicity for pennies by aerospace standards; the hobby gets its moonshot. Watch whether Boom formalizes rules, because “amateur-built” and “verified Mach 1” both need definitions before anyone can win. If this becomes a sanctioned event with timing gates in the desert, the 500 mph dorm jet that started it will have been the least interesting part of the story.

Source: Blake Scholl on X

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.