Henry Smolinski
All of the failed attempts at flying cars didn’t stop Ohio-based inventor Henry Smolinski from coming up with his own attempt at a part-car part-plane hybrid back in the early ‘70s. The “AVE Mizar,” as it was called, was pretty much built by smashing the rudders and wings from a Cessna aircraft onto the back of a Ford Pinto, resulting in the hot mess seen in the photo above.
It turns out the thing worked as well as it looked—on September 11th, 1973, during a test flight in Camarillo, California, one of the wing struts detached from the body of the Pinto while the machine was mid-flight. Needless to say, the car plummeted, and the Pinto (along with Smolinski, who was at the controls at the time) didn’t survive the trip.
