Shida, go back to hiding under your rock. It's where you belong.
Mace, no. There's a massive difference between "flutter" lossening locknuts which were old and should not have been used in the first place, to losing the entire flight surface.
The flight controls had LARGE mounting points. Large pins fited into the ribs of the flight surfaces (wings, tail, stabs, etc). There are reports that even when shot away and with the control surface fluttering wildly, planes have made it back safely. One Flying Tiger P-40 escorting B-24s was set upon by a Ki-43. It shredded his rudder control links, and the rudder, and the entire thing was flapping back and forth violently as he withstood a heavy onslaught of enemy fire. After being cleared by a wingman he flew home, rudder fluttering back and forth the entire time. He made it back perfectly safe.
You're trying to imply flutter is lethal, when it is not. Flutter causes a flight surface to flip up and down rapidly. When the surface is fixed in place, these translate into vibrations along the mounting points and the control arms or cables. It makes it harder for a pilot to hold the stick steady, for example. In Leeward's case, the flutter on the trim tab induced vibrations into the control arm, which became detached because of poor maintenance on the point of attachment. Once detached, the trim tab flapped up and down wildly (like a limp flag being whipped back and forth in a massive wind). The trim tab then failed, because it is only held onto the elevator by a handful of screws.
What brought down Leeward's P-51 wasn't the flutter on the trim tab. He had nose-down trim apparently to keep himself in his very high speed dive. To ease stick pressure the trim tab was deflecting the elevator down. As soon as the trim pressure was gone, the pressure of the airflow over the elevator slammed it back to "neutral" trim instantly. This was like jamming the stick back with hundreds of pounds of stick force in a split second. Leeward experienced 17Gs of pressure and blacked out instantly also.
Meanwhile flutter was only what removed a poorly maintained trimtab that lost its control arm. Had that control arm been properly in place, the tab and the elevator and ALL control surfaces would still have encountered flutter. It would have been inconsequential.
Don't confuse that with your mythical link between flutter and ripping off entire control surfaces in aces high. Flutter is there, but control surfaces are strong enough to survive with it.
P.S. The force of the pitch-up On Leeward was so bad that it bent the plane's frame behind the wing trailing edge attachment point.
