The wild 1970s flying car that actually worked... until it didn't

In 1973, a Ford Pinto with the wings of a Cessna took off on a triumphant test flight. Two minutes later, it crashed in a ball of fire, killing its two inventors and changing the way we think about flying cars forever.

Flying cars have been on the sci-fi wishlist for decades, always just out of reach. And there's a good reason for that: making a vehicle that functions well as both a car and an aircraft is a massive engineering and technological challenge.

But fifty years ago, two friends and experienced aerospace engineers thought they'd figured it out. Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake envisioned a regular car with a bolt-on airframe, so you could drive to the airport, attach your wings and tail, fly away, and then disconnect and stash them upon landing and drive away like normal.

If that sounds like a recipe for disaster to you… you’re right. But Smolinski and Blake formed a company—Advance Vehicle Engineers—and built a fully-functional prototype called the AVE Mizar out of a Cessna Skymaster and a 1971 Ford Pinto, which was one of the lightest cars coming out of Detroit at the time. And still quite heavy.

Amazingly, it did work—briefly. On the first test flight, the car successfully got airborne, but issue with one of the wing’s mounting brackets forced the test pilot to make an unscheduled landing in a bean field. But the images of a real flying car captivated people, and soon AVE was enjoying a burst of publicity that saw a Ford dealership sign up as a distributor and dozens of people place pre-orders for the $15,000 flying car.

The NTSB investigated the incident and found major structural deficiencies in the Mizar, including standard sheet metal screws being used to attach the wing struts. But the two inventors had too much riding on the project to stop, and decided to press ahead with another test flight in September 1973 with one major change: a bigger, more powerful, and heavier engine.

The test pilot who volunteered for the first flight was mysteriously unavailable, so Smolinski and Blake got behind the controls themselves and wheeled down the runway. Takeoff was successful, but at around 800 feet in the air, the stress of the added weight was too much for the Cessna’s airframe, and the craft began to disintegrate midair before crashing in a nearby parking lot. Both men were killed instantly.

The spectacular and public failure of the AVE Mizar marked the end of the chapter when people looked to planes as inspiration for flying cars, and opened the next one: drones. Fifty years later, “flying cars,” or VTOL aircraft as we call them now, are more in the news than ever before as automakers and startups are building on the explosion of interest in quadcopter drones and hoping to finally bring personal flight to the masses.

(They do know helicopters exist, right?)

0:00 Introduction
0:54 The brave inventors
2:09 Making a Ford Pinto fly
5:54 First test flight
7:36 The crash
9:19 Flying cars will never work

Produced by →   / joeyrassool  
Written by →   / kennapzok  
Hosted by →   / kylecheromcha  

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