Not even. Leeward's P-51 didn't lose control surfaces. They used bad locknuts on his trimtab.
Flutter is one thing. Flutter is vibrations oscillating back and forth. What happened to Leeward wasn't "flutter" ... It was sudden loss of trim which caused massive Gs.
I've read it elsewhere, when the crash just happened, but first google result that comes up is wiki so here's the copy and paste:
EDIT: P.S. There's a MASSIVE difference between trim tabs and their attachment points vs the entire control surface.
Just so you're not confusing one for the other, this is a trim tab:
(Image removed from quote.)
Well, thanks for the lecture and pretty picture Krusty but I think I know a little bit about airplanes and you are still wrong. Here's the part of your own quote that you seem to have missed:
This led to a fatigue crack in an attachment screw and allowed the trim tab to flutter. This flutter caused the trim tab link assembly to fail which led to loss of control of the aircraft
The P-51 was lost due to flutter. It's not a debatable subject, it's a simple fact. The proximate cause of the mishap was old locknuts but the failure mode was flutter just as the quote you provided says. Something like old locknuts may seem a surprising cause of flutter but even things as simple and varied as worn out bushings or even too much paint buildup can cause it. Causes also include lots of other stuff like incorrectly rigged, weighted, or balanced control surfaces all the way up to insufficient structural rigidity and damping leading to aeroelastic motions of an entire wing surface. Flutter is an extremely dangerous aerodynamic factor that has been known for a long, long time and it can, and has, lead to catastrophic failure. The faster you are the more likely it is you'll excite flutter and more damage will be done because of the greatly increased amounts of energy available. In the P-51's case the trim tab was loose and began to flutter causing it to fail which resulted in loss of control due to untrimmed aerodynamic loads on the horizontal elevator at high speed.
The fact that it was a the trim tab that failed due to flutter and not the entire elevator in this case is irrelevant. It's a great example of how the failure of even a small part can cause a catastrophic outcome but entire control surfaces, stabilizers, tails and even wings can be lost and because flutter is directly related to speed it's one of the primary limitations that can define an aircraft's Never Exceed Speed (Vne), in other words, your dive speed. When I was at Pax River a friend of mine was doing the flight tests on the Navy's new E-6 (known as Looking Glass) which was a militarized version of the Boeing 707. During the tests they did a Vne test by diving the plane and in spite of all the engineering analysis, careful test planning for safety, and instrumentation specifically designed to detect flutter before it could do any damage they lost the entire rudder. There is absolutely zero doubt that flutter during a high-speed dive can cause the loss of a control surface. I won't even caveat that statement with "in my opinion" because it's a simple, established, and well known fact. It's such a well known fact that every airplane built has to go through flutter testing because of the danger. The probability that a Hurricane would experience flutter in a high speed dive beyond Vne leading to catastrophic failure is right at 100%. What part that would fail is harder to say, it could be ailerons, rudder or even an entire stabilizer or wing but having the elevators fail is perfectly reasonable.
