A Boeing airliner has a travel limiter on the control surfaces that is automatically adjusted based on the speed. Exceeding that travel puts enough torque on the airplane to literally tear the structure apart.

There was an Airbus incident years ago where the pilot stamped on the rudder pedals to violently move the rudder full travel lock to lock, and it tore the rudder vertical stabilizer off.

There are also situations where no amount of control input is going to wrest control back from an uncontrolled dive.

In other words, designing the "feel forces" and travel has a large number of variables to it, and is not simple at all to get right.

For a dive fast enough, you run into an effect called "separation". This is where the air flowing over the wing no longer converges at the trailing edge, but separates. This separation can engulf the elevators such that even at full travel, the elevators are operating in dead air and from then on, you're just along for the ride into a crash.

This is a problem for many, many aircraft designs. You always gotta watch your airspeed.

This happened to a 727 once, where the autopilot went berserk and sent the airplane in a dive so bad that separation happened. The quick thinking pilot decided to lower the landing gear in a desperate attempt to slow the airplane down. He succeeded, although the slipstream tore the doors off and bent the gear backwards, and saved everyone.

It also happened to a 707, where the pilots weren't paying attention and the airplane slipped into a dive. By the pilots realized what had happened, they no longer had pitch control. One of them desperately began cranking the trim wheel by hand, and they managed to pull it up just before it hit the ocean.

Yeager's X1 rocket aircraft had this problem, as did the F-86 jet fighter.

For another fun anecdote, the F-80 Shooting Star had a problem in that its engine was too powerful. If you oversped the airplane, it would go unstable and pitch up, tearing the wings off. That meant the pilot always had to have one eye on the airspeed (yes, my dad was an F-80 pilot, and flew them in combat). One day, a pilot had a Mig on his tail he couldn't shake. He thought, I'm dead anyway, let's see if I can pitch up and lose the Mig. So he firewalled the throttle, and sure enough the F-80 went through a violent maneuver and miraculously the wings stayed on and he shook the Mig off his tail. When he landed, the wings were bent up and the airplane was scrapped.

Dive bombers used "dive brakes" to keep from overspeeding the airplane. My dad's favorite method for attacking an anti-aircraft gun emplacement was to dive straight down on it. AA gunners did not want to fire vertically (think about it). But it required my dad to have one eye on the target, one eye on the airspeed, and his third eye on the altitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcB31RgeL50 is the full video, well worth watching IMHO, but the talk about the fatal trim is at 51:00 to 53:00

However this was a real problem during WW2, and high speed dives killed more than a few pilots. By 1942-43 most fighter planes were able to dive fast enough to get into trouble (500+ mph/800 kph) but weren't designed for it at all. The aerodynamics of supersonic flight just weren't understood at the time. In some cases the design of the plane made it essentially impossible to pull out once you went beyond a certain speed, all you could do was attempt to slow down enough to regain control. The P-38 Lightning was notorious for this. I don't have any specific sources handy but I recall reading accounts of things like pilots bracing their feet against the control panel trying to pull the control stick with all their strength, taking extreme measures like lowering the landing gear to slow down (risking it being ripped off and maybe tearing the whole plane apart), or only surviving due to sheer luck - sometimes the thicker air at lower altitudes would slow them down enough before it was too late.

Airplanes' control surfaces have have smaller control surfaces inside them called tabs. Just as a small movement in a control surface is amplified into the larger movement of the entire airplane, a control tab's even smaller movement is amplified into the movement of the rest of the control surface, which in turn is amplified into the movement of the entire airplane.

Here's a good descriptions of different types of control tabs: https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/systems/4-types-of-t...

Many small airplanes, and pretty much every large airplane, effectively use tabs as a gross adjustment and the yoke/rudder as a fine adjustment, so under normal operation there shouldn't be large forces on the yoke or rudder. The only time it takes a lot of force to control an airplane is when the tab can't be easily controlled. Flying even a small Cessna 152 out of trim can take tens of pounds of force and be impossible to sustain for long periods of time. I once tried flying a 152 from one airport to another, only a few minutes away, without adjusting the elevator trim, and my arms were sore the next day.

Going into too fast of a dive has two much larger dangers, one is that the aircraft can break up from the aerodynamic forces, and the other is that the air becomes turbulent near the trailing of of a control surface, making it no longer able to control the aircraft. When the later happens, the controls don't take much force to move, but they also don't do much.

Summers spent parallel parking that pig left me pouring sweat.

Steering wheels for manual steering tend to be larger, giving more leverage, and the steering gearbox is geared differently.

This is true. However, most pilots in the early days came from the military, which likely selects towards the stronger end of the men's distributions.

My dad worked for a while as an instrument flying instructor. He said the big hurdle was to learn to trust the instruments and ignore your body screaming at you that the instruments are lying.

Your dad is exactly correct.

He flew F-104s? I'm so jealous! As a teen, I lived near Luke AFB. I had a military ID, and would bicycle onto the base and head to the flight line. Luke was training Luftwaffe pilots at the time to fly F-104s. They'd start down the runway, and halfway down would light the afterburners. Boom! Followed by a gigantic flame shooting out the back. They'd take off at a steep angle with the most delightful thunder.

I was so sorry to have to turn in my ID when I turned 21.

I wanted to be an AF pilot, but the recruiting officer reluctantly said I could never be a pilot because of my glasses. And so I went into writing compiler :-/

Getting disoriented in those conditions is expected. Knowingly flying into those conditions without an instrument rating is very bad judgment.

Why wouldn't I ask his opinion?

Yes, it is. Otherwise, "any carelessness, incapacity or neglect" wouldn't be so "terribly unforgiving".

Do you pronounce the “oo” in “coordination” the same way as you do in “bookkeeper”? Because that is a very weird mispronunciation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/coordination

It can't emphasize that; there's nothing to suggest that "naive" would rhyme with those words. It emphasizes that it doesn't rhyme with "glaive" and "waive"...

Secondly, the NYT is not in the deep south and doesn't abide by local conventions, so it stands out relative to its peers (e.g. LA Times, etc.).

I think some janky editor messed with it last year and nobody has noticed or checked the sources.

And concerns/mockery of “the flying housewife” alone in close quarters with a handsome navigator, gave way to an affair while en route, a love-child, and divorce? And there is a post on the Talk page from someone claiming to be that child... bonkers!

And Wikipedia says [unsourced] they “reached Japan [having flown northeast from Calcutta and Vietnam] but were denied permission to cross Russia [known in the 1940s as the Soviet Union]” — so what parts of “Russia” were east of Japan in 1948?