An early designation used in 1911 was "three plane system". The Fernic designs of the 1920s were referred to as "tandem". While there are indeed two lifting wing surfaces in tandem, the tailplane forms a third horizontal surface.
Pioneer experiments During the pioneer years of aviation a number of aircraft were flown with both fore and aft auxiliary surfaces. The issue of control vs. stability was poorly understood and typically pitch control was on the front surface with the rear surface also lifting, leading to instability in pitch. The
Kress Drachenflieger of 1901 and
Dufaux triplane of 1908 had insufficient power to take off. More successful types included the
Voisin-Farman I (1907) and
Curtiss No. 1 (1909). The
Wright Brothers too experimented on the basic Flyer design in an effort to obtain both controllability and stability, flying it at various times in first canard, then three surface and finally conventional configurations. By the outbreak of the
First World War in 1914, the main wing with smaller rear tail surface had become the conventional configuration and few three surface types would be flown for many years. The
Fokker V.8 of 1917 and
Caproni Ca.60 Noviplano of 1921 were both failures.
Soft stall and STOL In 1920s George Fernic developed the idea of two lifting surfaces in tandem, together with a conventional tailplane. The small foreplane was highly loaded and as the angle of attack increased it was designed to stall first, causing the nose to drop and allowing the aircraft to recover safely without stalling the main wing. This "soft" stall provides a level of safety in the stall which is not usually present in conventional designs. The
Fernic T-9, a three-surface monoplane, flew in 1929. Fernic was killed in an accident while flying its successor the FT-10 Cruisaire. It is possible to achieve such a soft stall with a pure
canard design, but it is then difficult to control the pitching and oscillations can develop as the foreplane repeatedly lifts the nose, stalls and recovers. Also, care must be taken in the design that the turbulent wake from the stalled foreplane does not in itself disturb the airflow over the main wing sufficiently to cause significant loss of lift and cancel out the nose-down
pitching moment. In the three-surface design the third, tail surface does not stall and provides better controllability. In the 1950s James Robertson developed his experimental Skyshark. This was a broadly conventional design but with a variety of features, including a small canard foreplane, intended to give not only a safe stall but good
Short takeoff and landing (STOL) performance. The foreplane allowed STOL performance to be achieved without the high angles of attack and accompanying dangers of stalling required by conventional STOL designs. The aircraft was evaluated by the US Army. Robertson's system was commercialised as the
Wren 460, a modified Cessna light aircraft. This in turn was later licensed and produced during the 1980s as the
Peterson 260SE and with the foreplane modification only as the 230SE. In 2006 a ruggedised variant, the
Peterson Katmai, entered production. A broadly similar approach is taken by the 1988 Eagle-XTS and its derivatives, the
Eagle 150 series.
Manoeuvrability beyond the stall , rear strake flaps deflected Around 1979, military jet designers began studying three-surface configurations as a way to provide enhanced manoeuvrability and control, especially at low speeds and high angles of attack such as during takeoff and combat. In the United States the experimental
Grumman X-29 flew in 1984 and a modified
McDonnell Douglas F-15, the
F-15 STOL/MTD, in 1988 but these designs were not followed up. In the
Soviet Union a
Sukhoi Su-27 modified with canard foreplanes flew in 1985 and derivatives of this design became the only military three-surface types to enter production.
Minimum wing surface Also in 1979,
Piaggio began design studies on a three-surface civil twin turboprop which, in collaboration with
Learjet, would emerge as the
Piaggio P.180 Avanti. This type first flew in 1986 and entered service in 1990, with production continuing today. In the Avanti, the three-surface configuration is claimed to significantly reduce wing size, weight and drag compared to the conventional equivalent. The
Catbird was a single-engined propeller-driven aircraft, envisioned by Rutan as a replacement for the
Beechcraft Bonanza. It holds the world record for speed over a closed circuit of without payload of set in 2014. ==Fighter aircraft design==