AeroMobil 3.0 flying car prototype forced to parachute to the ground

One dream for many people for decades has been to own a car that can fly to get you out of the long traffic jams that we all hate. A company called AeroMobil has been working on just that and rolled out the first prototype of its AeroMobil 3.0 flying car back in October of 2014. Late last week during a test flight of that prototype aircraft, something went wrong.

During a test flight in Slovakia the flying car entered into a tailspin that the pilot was unable to recover from. Had the flying car not been equipped with an advanced ballistic parachute system, the pilot and inventor of the AeroMobil 3.0 aircraft, Stefan Klein, may have died.

The advanced ballistic recovery parachute is a system that attaches a large parachute to an entire airplane and when activated gently lowers both the pilot and the aircraft to the ground. These systems have been in use in general aviation for a very long time.

Klein suffered only minor injuries in the accident and so far, there has been no word on exactly what caused the aircraft to enter into a tailspin that proved unrecoverable. The parachute system was activated at an altitude of about 900 feet according to a statement from AeroMobil. AeroMobil says that the data for the flight will be analyzed and used to improve the prototype.

SOURCE: CNET