Down to earth – Forbes

Bruce Willis alias Korben Dallas comfortably climbs into his taxi, opens the garage door and steers his car straight into the big city traffic chaos – hundreds of meters above the ground. We are in the year 2263 of the fictional world of the French director Luc Besson. In 1997, with his science fiction work “The Fifth Element”, he not only produced one of the most successful European films, but also dared to take a look at the future of traffic. He is not alone in this. As early as 1968, director Ken Hughes had his miracle car “Tschitti Tschitti Bäng Bäng” unfold and float through the air, and the legendary “Harry Potter” film series did not do without the flying car. The actual attempts to construct it are even older than the cinematic implementation of the phenomenon. In 1917, just 30 years after the automobile was invented, Glenn Curtiss took off with his prototype Curtiss Autoplane, but only for very short distances. Over the past century there have been numerous attempts to finally realize the dream of the flying car. On July 1st of this year, the fiction briefly became reality.

The Slovak engineer and designer Stefan Klein took off with his self-developed Aircar in Nitra, took a 35-minute flight to Bratislava, turned his vehicle back into a sports car at the push of a button and drove it comfortably to the city center. It has been a long journey for the entrepreneur to date. The fascination for aviation lies in Klein’s family. In 1989 he designed a flying car as part of his diploma thesis and has since devoted his life to implementing this vision. He succeeded in doing this with prototype 1 of the aircar. On the ground, the vehicle resembles an elegant sports car; in less than three minutes it can be transformed into an airworthy object at the push of a button. To do this, the propeller at the rear of the car is driven by a 160 hp motor. The wings extend from the flanks of the vehicle. The aircar can reach speeds of up to 190 km / h and an altitude of 2,500 meters. The model is not yet for sale. “Prototype 1 was developed as a test object. It should prove that the concept and the idea works ”, says Anton Zajac, co-founder of the Klein Vision company. Meanwhile, work is already underway on the second prototype. The founders Klein and Zajac cannot give a precise market entry date – they estimate that certified models could be sold in one to three years. However, you are not the first on the market.

There have been flying cars for sale since the 1960s, but these are mostly either too bad or too unattractive and impractical for the buyer to be able to assert themselves, says Stefan Levedag, head of the German Aerospace Institute. According to him, flying cars emerged from every driver’s dream of pressing a button in a traffic jam and simply taking off. “But there are very important reasons why this market has not worked so far. Nobody has earned a single euro with it – on the contrary, ”says Levedag, who has been observing the industry for years.

The design requirements for a car and an airplane are extremely different and difficult to combine. “But if you reconcile these things, the result is what we call a bad car and a lousy airplane.” You have to make a lot of compromises in order to technically implement such a vehicle, “but it is feasible,” says the professor. Manufacturers prove again and again that it is possible.

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