1. Henry Smolinski
AVE-Mizar
Henry Smolinski was a highly-trained experienced engineer who had worked for some of the top businesses of aerospace, when he decided to resign his job and create his own California-based company named “Advanced Vehicle Engineers,” specialised entirely in delivering a flying automobile to the marketplace.
His ambition was to build a flying automobile that was accessible and inexpensive to everyone - a dream of many ambitious engineers back in the ’70s. In 1973, the firm ultimately created the AVE Mizar, the first flying automobile, which was made by merging the rear end of a Cessna Skymaster plane with a Ford Pinto.
But Henry’s innovation killed him and his pilot in September of 1973, when the plane-car exploded in a blaze during a test flight. Shortly after the tragedy, the National Transportation Safety Board forbade any future testing of comparable projects, whose drawings maybe can be discovered to this day in the bottom drawers or dusty files of many an engineer.
2. Max Valier
Max-Valier
Max Valier was an Austrian inventor, scientist, and rocketry pioneer. He helped form the “Spaceflight Society” that would eventually bring together some of the best minds from across the globe aiming to make space flight a reality. But like many another brilliant innovator, Max Valier dabbled a bit too much.
While he was stunning the world again and again with his advancements in rocketry, he decided that he wanted to adapt the technology of rockets to automobiles – but the car-rocket that he envisioned was never created. In May of 1930, after a handful of successful liquid-fuel experiments, the alcohol-based fuel he was testing in his laboratory exploded, and Valier was murdered.
3. Michael Dacre
Michael-Dacre
Michael Dacre planned to provide the world its first flying taxi. Michael was a British aviation pioneer, a distinguished member of the British Air Forces, and managing director of the British-based Avcen Ltd. People who knew him characterised him as a guy who never stopped working and thinking, constantly centering his ideas around regular people and how to enhance their lives with his discoveries.
His ultimate dream was to create many “flying taxis” to carry passengers between Heathrow Airport and downtown London in approximately four minutes, at a cost of roughly £50. Unfortunately, the ardent aviation pioneer didn’t able to realise his ambition. In 2009, at the age of 53, he perished in a catastrophic accident on the very first test of the prototype of his flying taxi.
4. Aurel Vlaicu
Aurel Vlaicu
Aurel Vlaicu might be called a contemporary Daedalus, not only because of his innovative ideas in the area of aerospace, but also because of his terrible death. Born in Romania in 1882, he became one of the most outstanding innovators and aircraft builders of the 20th century.
After completing his engineering studies at the Munchen University in Germany, he proceeded to work for Opel, receiving one prize after another in pretty much every international competition of the period for his novel builds of aircraft. At the age of just 31, he had produced the first all-metal aircraft in history – the Vlaicu III, the third of a series of airplanes he named after himself.
However, on September 13, 1913, while realising his dream and testing his previous model — the Vlaicu II — above Dracula’s Carpathian Mountains, Vlaicu met his terrible fate when he crashed and perished, precisely like his personal idol and mythological hero Daedalus.
5. John Godfrey Parry-Thomas
John-Godfrey-Parry-Thomas
John Godfrey Parry-Thomas is a legend and an immortal in the world of fast automobiles and racing. A real enthusiast of speed, the Welsh engineer and driver established many land speed records throughout his eventful lifetime, including the world record achieved by his speed vehicle he dubbed Babs. Babs, also known as Chitty Bang Bang 4, attained speeds that were mythological at the time — as high as 274 km (170 mph) per hour.
But in 1927, driving his own contraption to recapture the land speed record, one of the links from the makeshift automobile came loose and hit John in the head, killing him immediately.