In the construction, thin-walled shell structures are used to cover the buildings of large areas, such as stadiums, hangars, circuses, airports. In this paper, the strength and buckling of closed conical shells as well as their panels are studied. The geometric nonlinearity and transverse shifts are taken into account. A mathematical model is used in the form of a functional of the total potential energy of deformation. Also expressions for deformations, forces and moments are given. The calculation program is implemented in the MatLab environment.