AirCar, the flying car of the Slovak company Klein Vision, successfully completed a 35-minute flight between the airports of Nitra and Bratislava (BTS), Slovakia.
“This flight starts a new era of dual transportation vehicles. It opens a new category of transportation and returns the freedom originally attributed to cars back to the individual,” said the AirCar’s creator and pilot, Professor Stefan Klein, after exiting the cockpit in Bratislava.
Since AirCar’s maiden flight on November 3, 2020, the flying car has accumulated over 40 hours of flight.
The vehicle can transfer from the road to the air in less than three minutes with just the push of a button.
It has a range of about 1,000km (600 miles), with a consumption of 18 liters per hour of conventional fuel from a BMW engine powering a propeller, according to its creator. The vehicle weighs 1,100 kilograms (2,400 pounds) and can carry an additional load of 200 kilograms (440 pounds) per flight.
The company hopes to capitalize on the demand for urban air mobility in the coming years.
“There are about 40,000 orders of aircraft in the United States alone,” Anton Zajac, a co-founder of Klein Vision told BBC. “If we convert 5% of those, to change the aircraft for the flying car, we will have a huge market.”
