[1] Consolidated Vultee Aircraft (later Convair) was seeking entry into the post-war aviation boom with a mainstream flying car.

Theodore P. "Ted" Hall had studied the concept of a flying car before World War II, with Consolidated unsuccessfully proposing the idea for use in commando-type raids.

Following the end of the war, Hall and Tommy Thompson designed and developed the Convair Model 116 Flying Car, featured in Popular Mechanics magazine in 1946,[2] which consisted of a two-seat car body, powered by a rear-mounted 26 hp (19 kW) engine, with detachable monoplane wings and tail, fitted with their own tractor configuration 90 hp (67 kW) Franklin 4A4 engine driving a two-bladed wooden propeller.

[3] Hall subsequently designed a more sophisticated development of the Model 116, with a more refined car body and a more powerful "flight" engine.

On November 18, 1947, while on a one-hour demonstration flight, it made a low fuel forced landing near San Diego, California, destroying the car body[5] and damaging the wing.