Over the past 100 years aircraft engineers have designed and re-designed aircraft to do a multitude of tasks. Designing aircraft is often a matter of compromise and much of the design is about what task the aircraft is to fulfill. This means that each aircraft will be slightly different as the engineer looks for a way to get his or her design to exploit a principle of flight or design in order to achieve the greatest performance for that task and the greatest efficiency in doing so. So often aerospace designers and aircraft engineers try to find new designs, which incorporate several methods of using bodies and airfoils to achieve better lift and less drag. In doing so often these aircraft begin to look like something out of a Sci Fi movie, rather than what an average person would think of as an airplane. When completely redesigning todays aircraft engineers often combine control surfaces, that is to say attempt to use combination control surfaces on aircraft airfoils.

For instance they might attempt in combining the flaps and the ailerons, there are various configurations for this. Or they may try to use a spoiler-ailerons configuration. Lots of this goes on in aviation and some of the systems get pretty tricky. In a "V" tail configuration the rudder and elevators work together. With canards it might make sense to have aileron-elevators. But in the future the wings will warp like a bird, same with the tail. And the whole wing might become the control surface; so much for aerospace design and aircraft engineering 101. Think on this in 2006.