If you ask those of us who grew up somewhere in the 1950s to 1970s what our car would be like in the year 2020, we might have described an Avrocar. This top secret vehicle from Canadian Avro was part hovercraft and part jet-powered vertical takeoff vehicle. There were two prototypes actually made and [Real Engineering] has a short video on how the prototypes worked, how the real design might have worked, and even has a lot of footage of the actual devices. You can see the video below.

The designer, [Jack Frost], experimented with ground effect and the Coanda effect. The Canadian branch of Avro, a British company, worked with the U.S. military and if you look at it, you wonder how many UFO sightings it caused. Nothing like a flying disk 18 feet in diameter going over your backyard to make you call the newspapers. On second thought, it probably never got enough altitude for that to happen.

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