Osculation for conic fibrations

Smooth projective surfaces fibered in conics over a smooth curve are investigated with respect to their k-th osculatory behavior. Due to the bound for the dimension of their osculating spaces they do not differ at all from a general surface for k=2, while their structure plays a significant role for k \geq 3. The dimension of the osculating space at any point is studied taking into account the possible existence of curves of low degree transverse to the fibers, and several examples are discussed to illustrate concretely the various situations arising in this analysis. As an application, a complete description of the osculatory behavior of Castelnuovo surfaces, i.e. rational surfaces whose hyperplane sections correspond to a linear system of nodal quartic plane curves. is given. The case k=3 for del Pezzo surfaces is also discussed, completing the analysis done for k=2$ i a previous paper of the authors (2001). Moreover, for conic fibrations X in P^N, whose k-th inflectional locus has the expected codimension a precise description of this locus is provided in terms of Chern classes. In particular, for N=8, it turns out that either X is hypo-osculating for k=3, or its third inflectional locus is 1-dimensional.