I learned the hard way that if you aren't using control surface mass dampers (balancers), you are skirting disaster with every flight. The violent kind of flutter described requires an initial deflection to set it off, usually a series of air bumps spaced about right to get the wing or stab into oscillation at the critical amplitude, after which it just takes off, with amplitude increasing rapidly with each cycle, until something breaks, detuning the system.

If you are lucky, an aileron or elevator may simply break off, leaving the rest of the structure in flyable shape. In severe cases, you hear a bang, accompanied by a cloud of hundreds of airplane pieces. Properly designed mass dampers will remove the danger 99 percent of the time.

Removing slop from linkages will seldom make any difference with this type of flutter, and may just raise the airspeed of onset, making the flutter even more destructive.