 For the past six years, flights have been made by a pair of X-29 aircraft from the Desert Lake Bed at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Facility. This highly sophisticated experimented plane, fires in the footsteps of new AXEA's aircraft, which pushed down lots of spin, yell to the maneuver of the Italian field officials here. Forward swept wings of a very recently become practical with the advent of super strong composite materials that resist natural bending and twisting. The X-29 requires a new breed of aeronautical technology, because it's thin wings, close coupled canards, the smaller movable surfaces in front of the wings, and rear strike flaps make it naturally unstable in flight. A fail-save triple redundant computer compensates for the instability by pulsing my net corrections about 40 times each second to the controls, smoothing out any unstable effects. The computers are as necessary to fly the airplane as the hydraulic system is that actually moves the actuators. Steve Ishmael, one of the program's principal test pilots, has experienced the benefits of combining new interrelated technology into one airplane. It gets at another advance in technology where you see the interaction for instance between the canard and this forward sweep, and that's very, very complex, and it varies as your angle attack and your mock changes. That's part of the beauty and the power of the art of designing airplanes. The advantage of a forward swept design is that air moving over the wing tends to flow inward rather than outward. This allows airflow to remain smooth around the wingtips and makes the X-29 easier to control in extreme maneuvers. It has exceeded predicted levels of maneuverability by flowing at very high end ends of attack, sometimes approaching 50 degrees. Most modern fighter jets have trouble handling anything in excess of 30 degrees. During the past six years, the X-29 has proven itself as a test bet for new ideas, including computer control flight systems and the use of composites in wing construction. This highly successful flight test program will almost certainly influence future commercial and fighter aircraft, keeping the United States at the forefront of aviation.