13. Henry Smolinski hoped his car-plane hybrid would change the way we travel but instead it ended up killing him
In the 1970s, several companies competed to try and build a successful car-plane hybrid. Among them was the American firm Advanced Vehicle Engineers (AVE). Set up by Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake, the Californian enterprise believed they could successfully fuse the body of a Ford Pinto car with a Cessna Skymaster plane. By mid-1973, the pair had their first prototype ready for testing. They hired a special test pilot, but he had to perform an emergency landing in a field when he realized that the right-wing might fall off.
A second test flight was soon arranged. This time, however, the test pilot was not available. Smolinski decided to fly his invention himself. He succeeded in leaving the ground but then, when he attempted to turn in the air, the right-wing folded. The hybrid plane plummeted to the ground and exploded, killing both Smolinski and his passenger instantly. An investigation concluded that the welding that attached the wings to the car body wasn’t good enough and this was to blame for the crash. While AVE’s flying days were over, several other inventors have since built their own flying cars – with differing degrees of success.
