Boom Supersonic Cuts Drill Guide Costs 92% With FDM

Boom Supersonic Turns to FDM for Overture Assembly Fixtures

Boom Supersonic is using fused deposition modeling to manufacture drill guides and assembly fixtures for its Overture supersonic jet, cutting part costs by 92 percent compared to traditional machining.

The company is developing Overture as a 60-to-80 seat supersonic airliner designed to run on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel. Its demonstrator, the XB-1, first flew in 2020 and retired in mid-2025 after completing its test program. Overture is now moving toward production, and that transition demands tooling at scale.

Stratasys FDM printers are producing the drill guides directly from digital models. No molds, no fixtures for fixtures, no long lead times from machine shops. When a design changes, the file changes and a new part prints overnight.

The 92 percent cost reduction is not the only benefit. Lead times for complex fixtures dropped from weeks to hours in some cases. That speed matters when you are iterating on an aircraft still in development. A delay in a single jig or guide can push back an entire assembly sequence.

Supersonic development has always been expensive. Concorde's tooling was built for a fleet of 14 airframes. Overture is targeting a much larger market, which means tooling costs could multiply quickly. Additive manufacturing offers a way to keep those costs from spiraling without sacrificing precision.

The aerospace industry has been slow to adopt polymer FDM for production tooling. Carbon fiber layup tools, drilling guides, and assembly jigs have traditionally been machined from aluminum or steel. Those materials are stiff and temperature-resistant, but they are also heavy and expensive to revise. A printed polymer guide can be stiff enough for many operations and cheap enough to discard when the design changes.

Boom is not alone. Aerospace primes and tier-one suppliers have been quietly expanding additive manufacturing into non-structural factory applications for several years. This announcement formalizes what many shops already know: 3D printing is a practical answer for low-volume, high-mix tooling.

Overture still faces certification hurdles, supply chain questions, and the fundamental physics of supersonic overland flight. But if the program can build its airplane faster and cheaper by printing its fixtures, that is one less variable to worry about.