Photo: CTV

Last Friday's crash of a flying car in Vernon has prompted the manufacturer of the prototype to ground the fleet until further notice.

Bill Yearwood with the Transportation Safety Board says the manufacturer of the Maverick LSA flying car has voluntarily taken the product out of the skies until a cause of last Friday's crash has been determined.

The owner has five prototypes around the world, however, the Vernon craft was the only one based in Canada.

Yearwood says the Transportation Safety Board did send an investigator to Vernon to document the crash site but will not be involved in the investigation.

"We are leaving it in their hands to try and determine what happened. We know he had a temporary loss of control. It's not clear why that was," says Yearwood.



"It's not something we would get too deeply involved with because there are not a lot of them out there."

While the main focus of the TSB is commercial aircraft operations, Yearwood says they will keep an eye on the investigation.

"They will feed us the information they learn and if there is any testing or any expertise we can help them with we will step in," says Yearwood.



"When it's all done we will make sure we have all that data entered into our data base. If these things start popping up we have some reference on where to go and what might be problems."

Ray Siebring, the owner and pilot of the craft in Vernon told Castanet News after leaving the hospital he thought it might have been the wind or something mechanical.

"All of a sudden we were in a spiral heading sharp left so we adjusted sharp right. When we stopped the spin we were too low and had to go in for the landing," stated Siebring at the time.

Maverick's company website did issue a brief statement on its website earlier this week.

They have confirmed Siebring has asked Maverick to send its chief test pilot to the Okanagan to try and determine the cause of the accident and the most effective way to get his machine back into operation.