Canard (aeronautics) flown, including the Ambrosini SS.4, Curtiss-Wright XP-55 Ascender and Kyūshū J7W1 "Shinden". These were attempts at using the canard configuration to give advantages in areas such as performance, armament disposition or pilot view, but no production aircraft were completed. The Shinden was ordered into production "off the drawing board" but hostilities ceased before any other than prototypes had flown. Just after the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, what may have been the first canard designed and flown in the Soviet Union appeared as a test aircraft, the lightweight Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-8 "Utka" (Russian for "duck"). It was
Canard (aeronautics) provide this protection. A canard foreplane may be used as a horizontal stabiliser, whether stability is achieved statically or artificially (fly-by-wire). Being placed ahead of the center of gravity, a canard foreplane acts directly to reduce longitudinal static stability (stability in pitch). The first airplane to achieve controlled, powered flight, the Wright Flyer, was conceived as a control-canard but in effect was also an unstable lifting canard. At that time the Wright brothers did not understand the basics of pitch stability of the canard configuration, and were in any event more concerned with controllability. Nevertheless, a canard stabiliser may be