It looks like a rough sketch from The Jetsons, yes. It costs the kind of money that will reflexively cause some people to toss it in the “billionaires’ toy club” category—and in the short term, that may well be where the product resides.
But no one in the transportation and aviation industry is chuckling any more at the notion of a flying car. In fact, companies are putting powerful resources behind it. And the world is not at all far from being able to ponder the practical applications of what once might’ve seemed a fanciful pursuit.
Unlike most other prototypes in this burgeoning industry, AirCar genuinely is both a road-certified car and a certified aircraft with fixed wings, not a hovercraft or VTOL, in the jargon of the business. (A VTOL is a vertical take-off and landing vehicle.) AirCar requires both a driver’s license and a pilot’s license to operate.
Despite a price tag that could range from $800,000 to $1.2 million for a two-seat version, AirCar may not ultimately be remembered as a mere hobbyist’s indulgence. The implications of a car that fully transforms into an airplane—in less than two minutes, Klein Vision executives say—could be profound, especially in areas with poor or no road infrastructure.
“You can take off from any airport with a relatively short runway—or even from a stretch of green grass,” Klein Vision co-founder Anton Zajac tells Fortune. “If you have 600 feet of grass, you’re good to go. It’s like something out of a James Bond movie—you push a button and it transforms automatically. The wings unfold, the tail extends, and it becomes an aircraft. You’re ready to fly.”
AirCar’s development may answer other needs. Imagine driving yourself to an airport and then simply flying off in the same vehicle in which you arrived. Upon landing at your short-haul destination airport, the plane converts back into a car, you drive home and park the vehicle right in your garage. No need for an airport hangar.
Klein Vision’s product, in its latest iteration, can fly 600 miles or more, Zajac says. The company is working on three engine models, ranging from 280 to 340 horsepower, and AirCar includes three gas tanks capable of holding a combined 160 liters of fuel. On the ground, the car can reach speeds exceeding 120 mph, with a range of 500 miles.
It makes for an impressive video presentation. But are there applications that go beyond, say, a well-heeled businessperson trying to get to a meeting a few hundred miles away who doesn’t want to call an Uber to the airport and stand in line to board a commercial flight?
That answer may determine the long-term market for products like AirCar. Zajac noted that any place with an airstrip—or even a sustained usable patch of ground—suddenly becomes reachable by the craft, a potentially significant development for getting to remote rural or island areas, search-and-rescue operations, and other uses.
Still, Zajac says, “The evolution of AirCar is not motivated by our attempts to solve global problems.” Rather, it’s the in-process result of an adult lifetime’s worth of innovation and tinkering by Klein Vision co-founder Stefan Klein, whose father and grandfather both developed flying prototypes before him. Klein, the youngest in his family, was actually his father’s test pilot, and had the broken bones to show for it, Zajac says. (AirCar includes a ballistic parachute in case of trouble.)
The price is prohibitive, of course, and obtaining a pilot’s license is both expensive and time-consuming for a neophyte. On the other hand, “There’s about 250,000 small aircraft in the United States,” Zajac says. “If we can replace 5%, the business will be very good.”
“Air traffic management is an unsolved problem for the time being, as everyone is looking further down the road on how we can manage safely a congested air space,” says airworthiness expert Kyriakos Kourousis, an associate professor at the University of Limerick’s school of engineering. “The recent Potomac River accident serves as a warning, among other things, as it shows some of the implications of increasing the volume of flights, while still offering flexibility to air vehicles.”
In that sense, products like AirCar may have an early advantage in getting to market. As dual-use vehicles, they’re already subject to the regulatory requirements for both autos and airplanes, and in the short term, at least, there won’t be enough of them joining the skies to make much difference.
“The purpose of the Switchblade is to solve regional travel by allowing people to travel on their schedule to over 10 times as many places as commercial airlines, with less hassle and in less than half the time,” says Samson Sky CEO Sam Bousfield, referring to his company’s three-wheel, street-legal vehicle, an experimental-category aircraft. Samson Sky plans to begin flight testing one of its production models in November; its projected price is in the low $200,000s, depending upon the cost of parts.
“While vertical-operating craft are nice, for the most part they are limited in range and payload,” says Brian Sagi, an aviation expert and executive chairman of C Cubed Aerospace. “VTOLs are also hamstrung by the need for charging and pad infrastructure, emergence of a viable regulatory system, and pilot training for a new type of aircraft.”
By contrast, more than 90% of the U.S. population lives within 25 miles of a public use airport, “and that airport can be flown into and driven away from in a flying car,” Sagi says.
Coming soon to an airstrip near you? Probably not. But no longer is it the stuff of science fiction, even if some of those involved still shake their heads at it all. “I think” says Zajac, “the fact that we have a flying car is a miracle.”
