By Federico Guerrini

VIENNA — Looks like tomorrow's skies are going to be pretty crowded. Today, Juraj Vaculik and Stefan Klein, of Slovakian company AeroMobil unveiled at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna what they call "the most advanced flying car". Able to drive 430 miles (692 Km) on a tank of petrol, it has a stylish design, with foldable wings. According to the founders, it has what it takes to become an integral part of the regular road traffic, while at the same time being able to land and take off in any airport in the world. 

The AeroMobil doesn't come out of the blue: as Vaculik said, the one unveiled in Vienna it's their third prototype; the first tests date back to the mid-90s. And the romantic idea of the AeroMobil is even older, deep-rooted in the two founders childhood, spent largely inside the Iron Curtain. Actually, during the Velvet Revolution in 1989 which ends communist era in former Czechoslovakia Vaculik was one of the key persons in the Student Movement which has started process of democratization and established new post-revolution government in Slovakia, according to his official biography in the company's website.

"When I was I young, I kept looking at the Danube, willing to travel, but at that time it wasn't so easy," he said, linking together mobility and freedom. The company identified three possible target markets for their product: commuters working in a range of two hundred kilometers or so from their home, business people that don't want to spend too much time waiting in queue for check-in in airports and, most important, residents in nations with little or no infrastructure for planes.

Two hundred meters for take off and about fifty for landing, is all that this flying car needs to operate, no need of long landing fields or other amenities. While emotional and attractive, the idea of personal aerial vehicles, does bring along problems as well. If it becomes popular, it will change completely not only the way we move from place to place, but also our relationship with the sky, which, so far, is one of the few place yet relatively unspoilt and not contaminated by human presence. Noise, pollution, not the mention the risk of collisions, will all have to be dealt with.

This is not going to stop innovation, anyway, as AeroMobil is not even the only company operating in this space. US based Terrafugia, is another. The European Union itself is working on a project called myCopter, focused on "design of an intuitive and user-friendly human-machine interface and required pilot training", and on "understanding societal needs that are necessary for the acceptance of personal aerial vehicles in today's society".

Researchers believe that the aircraft should take off and land vertically to minimize space requirements, and fly at relatively low altitudes along predetermined flight corridors in order to alleviate road congestion during rush hours. A German firm called E-Volo is already developing a prototype, called Volocopter, based on this specifications.

Sure enough, the adoption rates of all these personal aircrafts, will depend a lot on the price tag. The Terrafugia Transition costs $279,000. The Volocopter, €250,000. As for the AeroMobil, there's no fixed price yet.