Why do plane and helicopter pilots have to pysically fight with their control stick when flying and something goes wrong?

Question

Why do plane and helicopter pilots have to pysically fight with their control stick when flying and something goes wrong?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

Pilot here- it’s 99% theatrics to make it more dramatic in TV and movies.

The 1% of the time when it’s real would occur in only a couple situations.

In a fly-by-wire aircraft, the pilot’s inputs are fed into a computer that in turn actuates the control surfaces. A malfunction in the computer that causes a sudden, extreme control input, such as what happened in [Flight 302](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302) would be a situation likely to have the pilots fighting the controls to override the input (though there are established procedures that go beyond just fighting the control input)

In a manual flight control aircraft, where movements of the flight controls move pulleys and wires attached to the control surfaces, a failure such as a jammed pulley or sudden disconnection could leave a control surface-and the plane- in a dangerous configuration in which the pilots might be attempting extreme control inputs to stabilize the aircraft.

But overall, dramatically fighting the controls as in movies is a mostly futile endeavor. There are procedures and redundancies in place in most aircraft that make it unnecessary.