Some pilots felt that the formal term “inertia coupling” added damned little to your understanding of the phenomenon. The ship simply “uncorked” (as Crossfield liked to put it) and lost all semblance of aerodynamics and fell out of the sky like a bottle or a length of pipe. There was no way to maneuver out of a hypersonic tumble. The pilot took a furious beating from the g-forces and from being thrown about the cockpit. The more he experimented with the controls, the worse fix he was in.
