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During the 1930s and 1940s, aircraft designers worked on developing novel design features. Some of these features worked and are commonplace today. Other features fell by the wayside and have been forgotten. These novel design features include laminar flow wings, low-drag cooling systems, buried propulsion systems, canard configurations, jet engines, break-away wing tips, pressure cabins and swept wings. The development and applications of these features will be examined. Specific technical details of these applications will be included in this examination. For the design features that fell by the wayside, the reasons for this outcome will be discussed

This paper provides a retrospective of the aerodynamics of the Bell P-39 Airacobra and the Bell P-63 Kingcobra. Design details and information obtained from several drag reduction investigations conducted on these aircraft are presented. Additionally, results from a modern Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis of these aircraft are shown.

This paper reports on the analysis of several further canard configured aircraft using the VSAERO low-order panel method. Aircraft analyzed within include the Rutan VariEze, Defiant, Predator, Catbird and Triumph. In all cases VSAERO models of the complete aircraft have been used to calculate the aerodynamic performance of the aircraft. Comparisons of these results with flight test and wind tunnel data are included where data are available. Results presented herein show VSAERO to be reasonably accurate in predicting aircraft neutral point. Induced drag predictions tend to be inconsistent and future incorporation of a Trefftz Plane in VSAERO will probably rectify these problems. Overall, VSAERO is shown to be a useful tool for the aircraft design process.