A 737 can be flown by hand, without hydraulics or electricity, despite weighing over 50x more than a Cessna 172, or other small manually controlled airplanes.

A 737 can be flown by hand, without hydraulics or electricity, despite weighing over 50x more than a Cessna 172, or other small manually controlled airplanes. Airplanes' control surfaces have have smaller control surfaces inside them called tabs. Just as a small movement in a control surface is amplified into the larger movement of the entire airplane, a control tab's even smaller movement is amplified into the movement of the rest of the control surface, which in turn is amplified into the movement of the entire airplane. Here's a good descriptions of different types of control tabs: https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/systems/4-types-of-trim-tabs/ https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/systems/4-types-of-t... Many small airplanes, and pretty much every large airplane, effectively use tabs as a gross adjustment and the yoke/rudder as a fine adjustment, so under normal operation there shouldn't be large forces on the yoke or rudder. The only time it takes a lot of force to control an airplane is when the tab can't be easily controlled. Flying even a small Cessna 152 out of trim can take tens of pounds of force and be impossible to sustain for long periods of time. I once tried flying a 152 from one airport to another, only a few minutes away, without adjusting the elevator trim, and my arms were sore the next day. Going into too fast of a dive has two much larger dangers, one is that the aircraft can break up from the aerodynamic forces, and the other is that the air becomes turbulent near the trailing of of a control surface, making it no longer able to control the aircraft. When the later happens, the controls don't take much force to move, but they also don't do much.