Seventy four years after Henry Ford predicted the flying car it has become a reality with the unveiling of the AeroMobil 3.0 at the Pioneers Festival.
THE LAST TWO weeks have seen boffins show-off a hover board, a tractor beam, an autonomous race car that was faster than a human, a transforming car (a robot in disguise, if you will) and, now, the most advanced flying car. Yesterday, at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, AeroMobil, which has been working on its flying car for almost 25 years, presented its AeroMobil 3.0; a car that converts into a plane, or is it a plane that converts into a car. Either way it’s mind blowing.
According to the founders of Slovakian-based AeroMobil, Juraj Vaculik and Stefan Klein, the AeroMobil 3.0 is intended to be used in places where infrastructure isn’t that great, allowing owners to drive as far as the road will allow and then fly the rest of the way. Great. Indeed, the AeroMobil 2.5 has already been certified for use in Slovakia, and AeroMobil is currently undergoing testing for certification of the 3.0. Double great… let’s not get into the whole air traffic control thing right now; what AeroMobil has done is truly impressive so let’s not rain on its parade just yet.
“We believe personal transportation is about to change forever,” said AeroMobil chief executive Juraj Vaculik at the Pioneers Festival yesterday. “We think it’s time to make transportation more emotional and more personal.”
The idea for the AeroMobil flying car was down to Klein’s father to told the audience at Pioneers Festival, “My father was a bit of a dreamer and we tested a lot of flying objects,” he says. He was not very old at all when he realised that he wanted to make a flying car. Creating it, however, has been a 25 year-long mission with multiple challenges to overcome,” Klein says.
“These objects [the flying car] are coming from absolutely opposite worlds. Aeroplanes need lift, cars need downforce.” To mesh the two together, he says, you can “integrate two functions in one object or secondly you can use metamorphosis – you can transfer from one position to a second position.”
The AeroMobil is capable of flying at speeds of up to 200km/h, offers seating for two, only needs 250m to take off and 50m to land. Built from high-strength lightweight composite materials, AeroMobil claims the 3.0 works perfectly as either a car or a plane. And while it hasn’t released pricing yet its hinting it’ll be somewhere between the price of a supercar and a small plane. At the Pioneers Festival, Vaculik was adamant the company wasn’t just trying to build a Hollywood prop and so wouldn’t start taking orders until the company was sure it could produce the, er, vehicle/plane the right standard.
