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
Le Canard enchaîné considered one of (if not the) most objective French publications—hence its continued existence. It has a limited web presence, dependent, as it is, on selling a printed product. Despite declining newspaper circulations in France, and elsewhere, "Canard" is rich and growing. It owns cash reserves and property holdings worth 110 million euros. It runs cheaply and profitably, restricting itself to eight pages of two-color newsprint each week. Circulation has risen by a third since 2007 and its scandal-fuelled growth has seen a rise to 700,000 copies being printed and sold each week. Its net profit in 2009 was 5 million