After the end of the War, in 1946 Ted Hall and Tommy Thompson from the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft designed and built the two-seat Convair Model 116.
This prototype completed 66 test flights, and Hall designed another model, named the 118 (or the Convair Car). Two prototypes were built.
Consolidated Vultee bought rights to the original roadable design by their own Chief Development Engineer, Ted Hall. His creation was unusual in that the car portion looked exactly like a scaled down conventional automobile of the period, though suspended beneath its self contained ‘flight module’. The automobile had a streamlined glassfibre body with four seats, and was powered by a 26 hp Crosley car engine.
Where the ConvAircar also differed from previous roadables was that the company planned to sell only the car part, for $1500. Aircraft modules with 190 hp Lycoming aero engines would be rented out by the hour or day when the owner wanted to go flying. Convair spent $800,000 on building two prototypes at their San Diego plant and gearing up for a planned production run of 160,000 ConvAircars. The 725 lb auto-plane prototype first flew during November 1947. All went well until the third test flight, late in November 1947. The ConvAircar took-off with minimal gasoline in its tanks. The ConvAircar ran out of fuel and was wrecked, and shortly afterwards Convair ran out of enthusiasm.
All Aero 