Flying Car Prototype Travels Nearly 60 Miles
We were promised that, someday, we would have flying cars. That promise was probably first uttered the day after regular cars were invented. Then we saw “The Jetsons” on TV and that just amped up our appetite to take to the skies. But decades went by and we got nothing. Well, it appears that the future may finally be here.
CNN reports that a prototype of Klein Vision’s AirCar successfully flew between two cities in the Central European nation of Slovakia on June 28th. The roughly 59-mile flight from the airport in Nitra to the airport in the country’s capital, Bratislava, took 35 minutes.
Related: Could Flying Cars Become A Reality By 2023?
The AirCar Prototype 1 has now completed more than 40 hours of test flights, including flying at 8,200 feet and reaching a maximum cruising speed of 118 miles per hour. Equipped with a fixed propeller, the AirCar is powered by a 160 horsepower BMW engine.
After landing in Bratislava, the AirCar Prototype 1 transformed back into a car, a process which takes less than three minutes. Once the wings had folded up and into the body, the vehicle was driven from the airport to the city center by Klein Vision CEO Stefan Klein and company co-founder Anton Zajac.
Related: “Real-Life Green Goblin” Flies Over Times Square On Drone Hoverboard
Klein Vision is also working on a model called the AirCar Prototype 2. That one will be equipped with a 300 horsepower engine to give it a cruising speed of 186 miles per hour and a range of 621 miles. Furthermore, the company plans to develop three- and four-seat models, as well as twin-engine and amphibious versions of the AirCar.
