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At first glance, the AirCar looks like a sports car, but at the touch of a button it transforms into a two-seater aircraft. The first prototype of a flying car completed a 35-minute test flight between Nitra and Bratislava in June. The development team of Klein Vision, which also includes FME BUT graduates Dalibor Vlček and Miroslav Šenkýř, is now working on a second prototype. After certification, the flying car will be handed to customers.

The company’s owner and chief designer Štefan Klein sat behind the wheel of a flying car during the test flight between two Slovak cities: “It was one of the longest flights so far and there were no hiccups. The car is very easy to handle in the air and predictable for the pilot. We have not discovered any mistakes in the flight tests so far.”

The road-to-air conversion takes approximately 80 seconds. When the button is pressed, the wings automatically fold out of the fuselage and the tail surfaces extend. In road mode, the AirCar is a standard 5-metre vehicle with no parking issues in cities. In air mode, because of the tail, it extends by 1.5 metres and the wingspan exceeds 8 meters. The vehicle is controlled by a traditional steering wheel, which the pilot turns and moves back and forth during the flight like it was any conventional aircraft.

The AirCar’s technical design, which also holds several patents, differs from other smaller aircraft in its aerodynamic concept. “In a standard aircraft, the entire lift is generated by the wings, but in our case, the fuselage itself contributes about 25%. It is not a body that only creates aerodynamic resistance, but it has a shape that generates the buoyancy necessary to overcome the Earth’s gravity,” described the FME BUT graduate Dalibor Vlček, who is in charge of strength calculations and structure dimensioning in the AirCar project.

The first AirCar prototype reaches a speed of 190 km/h in flight and is equipped with a 140 horsepower engine. The second prototype, which Klein’s team is currently working on, will have twice the power and should cut through air at 300 km/h. The range per refuelling is extended to 700 - 1 000 km. To operate the vehicle, it is necessary to have a both pilot’s and driver’s licence.

The concept of a flying car represents a new type of means of transport, the dual vehicle, which should simplify and speed up passenger transport. “In traditional air travel, you spend time on the way to the airport, at check-in, an on the way from the airport. And even if you have your own plane, you need to pull it out of the hangar and get it ready. With a flying car, you can leave the house, arrive at any smaller airport, transform and take off. After landing, you will be comfortably transported directly to your destination,” added Vlček.

Although it is a new type of vehicle, the AirCar’s developers claim that the infrastructure is ready. In the Czech Republic, there is a relatively dense network of smaller airports for sports aircraft, which allow for take-off or landing of the AirCar. The corresponding pilot licence is owned by about 5,000 Czechs, and in the United States, which have more than 500,000 smaller aircraft pilots, the situation is even more favourable for this type of travel. Klein Vision wants to focus on this market with the second AirCar prototype after obtaining a certificate from the European Aviation Safety Agency. “If the certification process goes according to plan, customers could buy the first model of a flying car in 2 to 3 years,” Klein concluded.

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