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
Marius Canard return to the Maghreb, first as a teacher in the "Lycée de Tunis" and then as a professor in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Algiers. It was there that Canard, along with Georges Marçais, founded the "Institut d'Études Orientales" and began a journal that soon acquired international prominence among Orientalists: the "Annales". After 44 years of teaching in Algiers, Canard retired in 1961 to Paris, where he died in 1982. Among Canard's major scholarly achievements are his history of the Hamdanid dynasty, as well as his studies on the Fatimid Caliphate, a field which at the time