Here's a link to the article mentioned by Viking above. It's a very good read.
http://www.flightjournal.com/articles/me163/me163_1.aspI found this part near the end to be particularily interesting:
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When supersonic flow begins to appear on a wing or tail surface, the aerodynamic center moves aft, causing a nose-down pitching moment. As the Mach number increases, a shock wave forms at the aft boundary of the supersonic-flow bubble. When the shock gets strong enough it will cause the airflow to separate aft of the shock, leading to a loss of lift. This condition is called “shock stall.”
On the Me 163, the combination of the aft shift in aerodynamic center and shock stall led to a dangerous condition known as “Mach tuck.” If the Mach number exceeded approximately 0.85, the airplane would begin to nose down on its own. The pilot would naturally react by pulling on the stick and deflecting the elevons upward. This would cause a shock wave to form on the underside of the wing at the elevon hinge line. The elevons would shock stall and be unable to bring the nose up, causing the airplane to pitch over into an ever-steepening dive. The only hope for recovery was to wait until the airplane had dived to a lower altitude where the speed of sound is higher, thus reducing Mach number, and the elevons would regain effectiveness.
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This is precisly what happened to me approching 40K chasing a Pony and I didn't get control again until under 10K. That tells me that HT and staff have done a magnificent job in modeling this craft.
