Originally posted by TeeVee
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The "rip off" type that you mention, where the skin friction or the drag take thins apart.
The sonic heat type. When you approach the speed of sound the temperatures of the leading edges and nose of the fuselage (where the air is compressed in a shock wave) increases a lot and parts not prepared to withstand those high temps can fail.
Flutter, that is a vibration caused by interaction between aerodynamics, structural and inertia forces, that can be so divergent to the point of braking a wing in less than a full cycle.
There is an indirect mode, which is what 3WE mentions: When you approach the speed of sound the center of pressure moves from about 25% of the chord to about 50% of the chord (in full supersonic regime). That means that the lift moves aft and generates a strong nose-down pitching moment. This can put the plane into a dive, which would increase the speed and would move the CP even further which worsens the dive and so on. The result is an uncommanded and sometimes uncontrollable and unrecoverable dive that, eventually, makes the plane fail due to one of the modes mentioned above, or when the elevator or wing fails due to excessive lift when the pilot applies a lot of nose-up command in an attempt to recover (of course this kind of thing can happen even at speeds well below overspeed if the pilot is too aggresive with the control inputs, ask AA A300). So even if the thrust by itself is not enough to put the plane in a "rip off" mood, the subsequent unavoidable dive can.
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