[WalterBright]

All airplanes have bugs, too.

The F-80, for example, if you flew it too fast (and the engine was powerful enough to do that in level flight) the airplane would suddenly "pitch up", fold the wings back, and crash.

There are endless examples of these kinds of "bugs" in leading edge fighter design that have nothing to do with software.

[arethuza]

I was reading to "One Minute to Midnight" about the Cuban msisile crisis and the account of flying a U-2 was pretty scary - at high altitude they had a very narrow range of speeds at which they could fly, fly too fast and the wings come off, fly to slowly and the plane stalls.

[outworlder]

This is called the "coffin corner". It varies for different aircrafts, but they all have it, including commercial liners.

[WalterBright]

The P-51 had an interesting problem shared with other high torque single engine fighters of its day. If you're coming in for a landing, with the engine idling, decided to abort and firewalled the throttle, the airplane would rotate about the crankshaft.

This killed a lot of pilots.

[arethuza]

"The aircraft's stall speed at that altitude is only 10 knots (12 mph; 19 km/h) below its maximum speed"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2