Flying Car Crash Cause Determined

Some tangled parachute lines, a seriously aft C of G and some kind of air turbulence ganged up on a Maverick flying car to send it spiraling into a schoolyard in western Canada in early May. Canada's Transportation Safety Board turned over the investigation to the manufacturer of the aircraft, ITEC, to come up with the cause and the company's COO Troy Townsend traveled to Kelowna, British Columbia, a week later to conduct the probe. By analyzing video from two GoPro cameras onboard the aircraft, plus video shot from the ground by AVweb and airport surveillance camera video, Townsend and pilot Ray Siebring determined at least three independent factors contributed to the stall/spin that ended with the Maverick spinning from an altitude of about 500 feet into the playground fence of a school in Vernon, B.C., on May 10. "Any one of those factors wasn't enough to bring the aircraft down but they all added up together," said Townsend, who has hundreds of hours on the vehicle, which is really just a large powered parachute with a street-legal car as its payload