Quote Originally Posted by steveinindy View Post
Ron, the so called control surface injuries to the hands and feet are poor indicators of who was actively in control at the moment of the crash. A lot of known pilots do not have them (poor sensitivity) and a lot of non-pilots have them from contact with cockpit structures during crashes (poor specificity). Les Folio addressed this in one of his articles out of the AFIP. I can send you a copy of you like. Basically unless you have a black box or the hand is clenched in cadaveric spasm around the controls, there does not appear to be a reliable indicator as to who was in control.
Gotcha, understand. Lots of tubing and whatnot for the passenger to be clutching....

I heard the hand-injury thing at an NTSB presentation ~25 years ago, undoubtedly the state of the art is improved.

Ron Wanttaja