Klein Vision, all about the Slovak flying car company
Partners, top management and business of the Slovakian company Klein Vision which built the prototype of the Aircar which made its first intercity flight in Slovakia
Flying cars are reality. At least it is AirCar, a prototype car capable of reaching 2500 meters in height and 160 km / h which last Monday made its first intercity flight in Slovakia. It started – actually, took off – from Nitra airport (90 km east of Bratislava), after landing the vehicle, in just three minutes, was transformed into a sports car and arrived in the center of the Slovak capital.
The AirCar Prototype 1, which has a 160 horsepower fixed propeller engine, was born from a project of Professor Stefan Klein and was developed by the Slovak company KleinVision. In the video , she is seen darting across a runway before taking off. Then he lands, spreads his wings and drives along a highway to arrive in the heart of the Slovak capital.
According to KleinVision, the 35-minute flight from Nitra to Bratislava was "a development milestone and is close to production". The developers added that the AirCar, having completed more than 40 hours of test flights, would be an ideal solution for leisure and self-driving travel or as a commercial taxi.
After exiting the cockpit of the AirCar, Professor Klein stated that “this flight ushers in a new era of dual transport vehicles; opens a new category of transport and restores to the individual the freedom originally attributed to cars ”. KleinVision co-founder Anton Zajac added that "AirCar is no longer just a proof of concept: flying at 2,500 meters at a speed of 160 kilometers per hour, it has made science fiction a reality."
KLEIN VISION, HOW THE FLYING CAR COMPANY WAS BORN
The Klein Vision company was founded by Stefan Klein, who has dedicated the last twenty years of his life to making his dream of a flying car a reality. After graduating from the Slovak University of Technology in 1983, Klein studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (AFAD) – of which he became head of the department for transport and design – and at the École des Beaux Arts et Design in Saint Étienne.
As you can read on the official Klein Vision website , his very strong passion for flying led him, in 2010, to found with his brother and some close friends the charter airline AirExplore, with which he accumulated over 1,200 flying hours on a plane to engine, over 3,000 hours of flight on a glider and hundreds of hours as a test pilot.
In 2011 Klein founded the Aeromobil company, for which he designs and builds several vehicle prototypes. The first of these, “AeroMobil I”, consisted of 4 bearing surfaces with a canard fin design.
In 2016 he left AeroMobil and in 2017, together with his friend and entrepreneur Anton Zajac, he founded KleinVision, dedicating himself to applied research and design. The AirCar project has been developed in KleinVision since 2017 and represents a brand new technology with 12 patents that protect a new and unique way of transformation from car to plane and vice versa.
Klein is also responsible for innovative research projects in collaboration with Audi, Volkswagen and BMW.
AIRCAR, OPERATION AND EXIT TO THE MARKET
AirCar has two wings that unfold and a single propeller in the rear: when the vehicle is on the road the wings fold, with the car occupying the space of a normal parking lot. The developers explained that the vehicle is designed so that stability and control are accessible to any driver, without specialist training.
Once all the flight tests required by law are completed, a more powerful engine could be installed on the vehicle and, in the company's ideas, AirCar could be commercialized within the next 12 months. The pre-production model, dubbed the “AirCar Prototype 2”, will have a 300 horsepower engine and should have a cruising speed of 300 km / h and a range of 1,000 km.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/klein-vision-tutto-sulla-societa-slovacca-delle-auto-volanti/ on Mon, 26 Jul 2021 05:52:52 +0000.