Dudley Henriques wrote a bunch of stuff about lead, lag,
and tracking.

That's al well and good, but in your case as with Michael's,
we don't really know what the mishap airplane was actually
doing - all that's been given here is a qualitative 'keeping
up.' Michael has extrapolated that to the extreme steady-state
welded-wing example and you have added the semi-steady-
state example of tracking techniques. You and I both know that
real-life 'keeping up', particularly in an ACM-type environment,
is never steady-state, and all the generalizations fall apart in
the specific, particularly when a limit case is experienced.
So...was the failure stress (STRESS, not normal acceleration)
over the spec value on the mishap airplane? The people shooting
down the investigation results should be prepared to answer this...
quantitatively.

Dave 'rhetorical' Hyde