The weapon of choice amongst suicidal pilots is likely to remain the illustrious 737, which has been around since the late 1960's and has few of the safeguards that the later generation of fly-by-wire airliners have.
Things move slowly in aviation circles for good reasons, but it was several years ago now that Airbus floated the idea of a single-pilot operating airliners that may also be controlled from the ground; and this can only accelerate the sentiment I would have thought.
The Boeing still has cables that connect the control-yoke to hydraulic rams to move its control surfaces like the rudder, and as I recall a manual reversion mode allowed for it to be directed by brute force alone as might your car should its power-steering pack in.
Two things of note here are that minus data from its black-box we are unlikely to know what speed it achieved in the powered dive pursued yesterday by the rogue co-pilot; data from FlightRadar in all likelihood stems from GPS data that describes geographic travel along track.
Nonetheless well before the time near-supersonic speeds are achieved, over-use of the controls on this older generation of airliner will likely see surfaces (such as the rudder missing here) torn away by the pressure.
The good news is that the deflection can do two things viz. remove a rudder-surface or else the entire tail-fin with it... as happened to the Airbus 300 flown by American several years ago. Without the fin, as any number of sharks in the South China Sea have discovered, you're going down sooner rather than later.
The other thing of note is that ~ as seen below ~ it was a passenger who pulled the control yoke backward to recover from dive. He learned to do so from watching Air Crash Investigation episodes, so maybe what's written here is not entirely wasted?
