Flying cars are being seen as the future of the automobile industry but it’s a well-documented fact that they were invented 70 years ago. In what might seem like an extremely improbable scenario, two prototype flying cars were built and flown.

The Convair Model 118 ConvAirCar was the prototype flying car that had the potential to change how the automobile industry worked. The first prototype suffered from a minor accident because of fuel shortage.

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The Convair Model 118 ConvAirCar had a few successful flights before getting canned and it also landed in a park in Washington DC as a part of a demonstration. Theodore P. ‘Ted’ Hall had studied the concept of a flying car before World War II, and had proposed this idea to facilitate raids where commandos would fly into the battlefields.

The second prototype was built with parts from the first one. With the second test flight resulting in the death of the driver/pilot, the project lost momentum and was discontinued.

Popular Science 1946

The flying car is testament to the fact that we’ve already tried our luck at the seemingly futuristic tech and we’ve succeeded as well.

‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ doesn’t seem like a distant possibility now, does it?