My father was in the Army Air Corp during WWII and he told me of discussions with pilots who described weird effects during some dives that he later contributed to being near the sound barrier. Control issues mainly, which seem to match what I remember being the reason the "sound barrier" got named that.
Wikipedia:
sound barrier -
early problems
Quote:
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Propeller aircraft were nevertheless able to approach the speed of sound in a dive. However this led to numerous crashes for a variety of reasons. These included the rapidly increasing forces on the various control surfaces, which led to the aircraft becoming difficult to control to the point where many suffered from powered flight into terrain when the pilot was unable to overcome the force on the control stick. The Mitsubishi Zero was infamous for this problem, and several attempts to fix it only made the problem worse. In the case of the Supermarine Spitfire, the wings suffered from low torsional stiffness, and when ailerons were moved the wing tended to flex in a such a way to counteract the control input, leading to a condition known as "roll reversal". This was solved in later models with changes to the wing. The P-38 Lightning suffered from a particularly dangerous interaction of the airflow between the wings and tail surfaces in the dive that made it difficult to "pull out", a problem that was later solved with the addition of a "dive flap" that upset the airflow under these circumstances. Flutter due to the formation of shock waves on curved surfaces was another major problem, which led most famously to the breakup of de Havilland Swallow and death of its pilot, Geoffrey de Havilland Jr.
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