Canard (Aeronautics)

A canard is a fixed wing aircraft configuration in which a small forewing, or foreplane, is mounted ahead of the aircraft's main wing rather than behind it as a conventional tailplane would be. The foreplane contributes its own lift to the aircraft and produces a downwash that interacts with the main wing, an effect that can be used, depending on the specific design, to control the aircraft's pitch, to trim it in level flight, or to improve its stability, and modern canard aircraft typically rely on computerized fly by wire systems to manage those effects. The very first successful powered aircraft, the 1903 Wright Flyer, was a canard biplane, since the Wright brothers believed instability of the kind a forward surface produces was necessary for a pilot to control the machine, and the configuration's name came a few years later from the Santos-Dumont 14-bis of 1906, whose shape in flight reminded observers of a duck stretching out its neck, canard being French for duck. Canard designs mostly disappeared after 1911 and did not return to mainstream aircraft design until the Saab Viggen entered production in 1967, once a better understanding of aerodynamics and technologies like fly by wire made the configuration practical again.