Just a quick reply on the question a very good friend of mine .. Dynamite Dean asked about coffins corner and wing design..
As we know , the higher the aircraft flies the thinner the air gets and the more an aircrafts performance is affected..
This in short means that the thinner the air gets, the faster through the air you have to move your wing to produce the correct amount of lift for your aircraft at a given weight and configuration.
For example.. lets say you are cruising at M0.84 at FL370, you start your climb to FL410 at a constant mach number of 0.84.. in this case you will agree that your TAS is decreasing... eventually you will reach a piont where your mach cruise is not sufficient to produce enough lift for your wings, but you are at Mmo.. this is shortly what coffins corner is.. The U-2 had the worst coffins corner of them all, in a steady left turn at 70 000+ feet the airflow over the left wing will be slower than the airflow over the right wing.. this will result in the left wing going into a slow speed stall and the right wing approaching the high speed stall... this is one reason why the U-2 has such a great turning circle, with a coffins corner of only 5 knots, a steady hand was needed.
As far as your question about the wing design, you have to remember that it is vital to keep the wing tips inside the shock cone.. having a wingtip extend into the shock wave produced by the nose of the aircraft can cause serious buffet and tip stalling due to flow upset..
For this very reason the AVRO company when designing the Vulcan had to camber the wing tips to a more agressive angle to keep it inside the shock wave... the vulcan had a much larger delta span wise than the concorde if you compare wingspan to fuselarge length.. and a much thicker wing.. thus the vulcan would reach the Mmo much quicker than the Concorde, but its slow speed stall was retarded due to the low wing loading it had.
Hope this helps a bit..
