A brave driver just completed one of the coolest test drives in history, piloting a flying car on a flight between two cities in Slovakia.
The prototype AirCar spent 35 minutes in the air en route from Nitra to the Slovakian capital of Bratislava on Monday, according to a news release from its designer, Klein Vision.
Klein Vision says the prototype car completed the journey in half the time that it would take a road vehicle.
Video released by the company shows the “dual-mode car-aircraft vehicle” taking off from an airport, soaring through the air, then landing and retracting its wings before driving into downtown Bratislava.
The company’s founder and AirCar inventor Stefan Klein was behind the wheel for the journey, which he hopes will start a “new era” of land-and-sky travel.
“It opens a new category of transportation and returns the freedom originally attributed to cars back to the individual,” Klein said. “It has turned science fiction into reality.”
That science fiction dream was once confined to films like Back to the Future, but inventors have been trying to make it a reality with various flying-car prototypes in recent years.
Klein is not the first person to successfully take off in a flying car, but his test flight is being hailed as a milestone on the way to an airborne future.
A flying-car future is still a long way down the road — but hopefully where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Technology Express staff and is published from a syndicated feed)
