Most planes are mostly single curvature surfaces except for fairings, noses, tails and blisters and those are all reasonably accessable with consumer CAD. But if you want to flatten curved surfaces, that's a subject on its own and so-called "sheet metal tools" are only part of it. TC Pro develops some specific developable surfaces but not all. There is a PowerPack plugin for TCMac that develops general ruled surfaces, but, well, Mac, TC for it and plugin all cost. A low-cost tool for single curvature and some expansion into compound curvature is an old-school marine design program called Pilot3D, quite easy to learn and competent, but an antiquated UI and limited compatibility with TC delux. For faceted surfaces that TC delux produces, there's an excellent low cost program called UltimateUnwrap3D. it lays out triangulated surfaces fast, you can see overlaps immediately and change the tear paths through the faces to clear them. If the faceting is fine enough, it does as good a job as most "precise" development programs, and because you can specify tear paths, you can expand even compound curvature surfaces with it to lay them flat. It works something like the methodology that old-school TCers developed before unbend and unfold, explode-to-polylines-and-place-on-workplane-then-align-edges to develop surfaces fifteen or twenty years ago, but *fast*, because the triangle edge alignment's maintained automatically. There are also blender add-ons that flatten meshes, but you've gotta learn some Blender to use them, which was slow going and intimidating to me....There's a Python script for FreeCAD that develops ruled surfaces, but it can be hit'n'miss, especially if you aren't familiar with the conditions that govern surface development. OTOH, FreeCAD also imports .dat airfoil profiles straight up - and as the name implies, it's as cheap as it can be. When you consider that most light aircraft were designed on paper until into this century, we're pretty spoiled for choice - but nothing's automatic. I think it was our resident expert Henry Hubich who observed years ago on the old TC forums that many of the inquiries posted followed the form "where's the draw-my-boat tool?".
