Yah, it sounds like someone screwed up. It’s why I hate little planes with the engine compartment bolted together instead of cowls. I was amazed at how many things I caught just looking the engine over before a flight. A wire harness too close to the exhaust, a leaking parking brake valve, a cracked header, an EGT sensor hanging to the side after an annual, bird nests, valve covers leaking… And that’s just eyeballing it without putting a lot of effort into the process.
Or not… 
As @LSLGuy mentioned, FBW aircraft, or Airbus at least, have a display of the control surface position to check against movement of the side stick. However this system did not prevent a serious incident where the captain’s side stick had been wired incorrectly after maintenance and was rolling in the reverse sense. It was discovered after take-off and the FO took over control with their correctly wired stick.
It wasn’t so much the system that let them down, but probably not following the procedure properly.
Imagine if both sticks were wired backwards. That would have gotten ugly fast.
Yipes! Hadn’t heard about that one. Although it’s 20+ years old now.
My only FBW experience was the F-16. Each after-start-before-taxi included full stick deflection in each direction and a look over each shoulder at each stop to see the flaperons and horizontal tails doing the right thing. Plus pedals for rudder.
No surface position indicators needed, you could see the e.g. right horizontal tail over your left shoulder if you cranked your torso around hard enough.
I don’t immediately recall whether we’d separately check the aft stick in the two seat models when we (rarely) had a pilot back there as well. Far more often we just flew the 2-seater alone as just another single seater albeit with a slightly higher empty weight and ~20% less internal fuel capacity.
But yeah, even with conventional controls in a Cessna you had to develop a little mantra to make sure you were verifying all the surfaces were doing the right thing, not just something. As always in aviation, and especially in complex aviation, it is seductively easy to look without seeing everything to be seen.
e.g.
Yoke left: left aileron up, right aileron down.
Yoke right: right aileron up, left aileron down.
Yoke forward: horizontal tail aft edge down.
Yoke aft: horizontal tail aft edge up.
Left rudder pedal: rudder left.
Right rudder pedal: rudder right.
The difference in the Viper was the horizontal tails deflected differentially in roll just like the ailerons did. So it became e.g.
Stick left, look left: left aileron up, left tail aft edge up. Look to right: right aileron down, right tail aft edge down.
etc.
Is this a common setup in aircraft?
In the A320 we do something very similar.
The Pilot Flying says “Flight control check” then pulls their side stick back, forward, left, then right, watching the flight control display for full and correct movement. Meanwhile the Pilot Monitoring watches for full and correct movement and calls “Full up, full down, neutral, full left, full right, neutral”. The rudder is checked in a similar way with the PM following through on the pedals. Then the PM silently checks their own controls.
My employer does this prior to taxi, some do it while taxying. There is some talk of us doing it during taxi, as I believe that’s Airbus SOP, but I think there’s a lot to be said for doing it when there are no other distractions.
Like many procedures, it’s only as good as the professionalism of people doing it on the day.
A great many years ago – way back in the days of the DC-8 – I remember seeing the aileron on my side of the plane flapping up and down, obviously being checked out. But this was occurring right on the runway, seconds before takeoff. Hard to believe procedures were that lax back then, especially on Air Canada which was known for its safety record. I suppose it could be that all the checks were already all done and the pilot was just idly checking stuff a second time while waiting for takeoff clearance.
Every V-tail has a linkage for that. The Beech V-35 Bonanza, for example (“The Fork-Tailed Doctor Killer”). Supposedly doing away wit the vertical fin saves a little weight and drag, but I don’t think it was significant.
Modern fighters yes. Other aircraft no, or at least not that I’m aware of.
Differential use of the the horizontal tails can add a lot of roll authority. They’re augmenting the ailerons. But are much larger, although typically mounted a bit closer to the aircraft centerline. Canard-equipped fighters often do something similar with the canards; symmetrical deflection for pitch, and asymmetrical deflection for roll. Plus now the F-22 and other subsequent twin-engine non-US designs use differential thrust vectoring as part of high performance roll control.
As @Sam_Stone mostly said, V-tailed aircraft are a different but closely-related matter.
The surfaces on an e.g. V-tailed Bonanza are called ruddervators. So they are not directly connected to the ailerons, but rather to the rudder pedals for yaw and to the yoke for pitch. A mechanical mixer blends the two dissimilar inputs to produce the right outputs. So they move symmetrically to affect pitch and assymetrically to affect yaw.
Actually “symmetrically” is kind of a complicated concept in this case. Because the surfaces are tilted at ~45 degrees, whether the deflection is symmetrical or asymmetrical depends on whether you’re thinking of them as moving up/down or left/right. In reality they’re doing both simultaneously.
To pitch up both ruddervator surfaces deflect symmetrically upwards. Which pushes the tail and aft fuselage down. In so doing, the left ruddervator deflects right and creates a tail → left force while the right ruddervator deflects left and produces a tail → right force. Which net to zero so there’s no net yaw force on the tail or aft fuselage.
Meanwhile, to yaw left both ruddervator surfaces deflect symmetrically to the left. Which pushes the tail and aft fuselage right. In so doing, the left ruddervator deflects down and creates a tail → up force while the right ruddervator deflects up and produces a tail → down force. Which net to zero so there’s no net pitch force on the tail or aft fuselage.
However, there is a small net rolling force. The left ruddervator acts as an aileron to induce right roll, while the right ruddervator acts as an aileron to also produce right roll.
Normally if you mash a rudder pedal in an ordinary 3-axis airplane the airplane will roll towards the input. E.g. mash left rudder, get left yaw accompanied after a brief delay by left roll. Anyone entering a slip is familiar with the challenges of feeding in both roll & yaw controls at the right rate and ratio to get a smooth precise result.
In an e.g. Bonanza, the tendency for yaw to produce roll is mostly offset by the opposing net rolling force of the ruddervators. Conventional 3-surface tails with all the rudder above the fuselage centerline have a similar counter-roll effect, but not as much.
As sophisticated airplanes get weirder and weirder what with stealth and relaxed stability and thrust vectoring and tailless designs and mixed rotor-/wing-borne flight and all that, the conventional notions of 3 independent axes of control are increasingly irrelevant.
The world still exists in 3D, but a lot of different effectors each push and pull in different directions with different inherent power and leverage all under computer control to produce some desired net force vector on the vehicle as a whole.
As a total aside, I’d just like to drop in and thank all our pilots, because I am always learning new things reading your chatter. My flight experience is limited to stooging around SoCal and Kansas in my dad’s Stinson 108 back in the day.
I figured the Bonanza might do something like that but I have no clue how they mixed the Ercoupe controls when they eliminated the pedals. I always wondered if that had something to do with their JATO rocket launches. I Here’s a clip with one racing what looks like a Stinson.
The Ercoupe was real simple. They had conventional rudders but attached to the aileron controls rather than the (non-existent) pedals. So left yoke deployed left aileron up, right aileron down, and rudders left. Plus nosewheel left for taxiing. You could not cross-control and so you could not slip. That also meant it was real hard to spin if you got it stalled.
And as part of their total “everyman’s airplane” design philosophy they made them real hard to stall. You can (mostly) stall-proof an airplane just by giving it very limited nose-up control power. If the elevator runs out of ability to create pitch change before the wing runs out of ability to generate lift, it takes a very concerted pilot effort to create a true stall.
Hear, hear!
I didn’t realize the JATO launch experiments were in 1941. They might have been able to use them on the B-25’s for the Doolittle raids. They had been used by the Russians 10 years earlier and the British and Germans used them in WW-II. Wiki article.
Kinda.
The 1941 tests were with rockets with teeny thrust to move a teeny plane. It was the late 1950s by the time they got up to thrust levels that would have been useful for a B-25 sized airplane.
True but the launches of the C-130 used quite a few of them and as designs go it’s an easily scalable rocket. Basically a tube with an igniter and propellant. It was already old technology by the time the US started tinkering with it.
Good point. And it’s probably far safer to have e.g. 10 small rockets on each side versus one large one. The occasional failure to ignite is expected, but I’d rather have a 5% asymmetry than a 100% asymmetry.
Just remember: In WWII, aircraft carrier flight decks were made of wood. 
As long as the planes keep moving, the rocket exhaust shouldn’t cause too much local heating of the thick deck boards. But yeah, they’ll have splinters catching fire all up and down the ship. IIRC it was raining as the Raiders launched, but of course mission planning couldn’t count on that.
Now that I think about it …
Aborting their takeoffs, JATO or no, was impossible. So planning to douse the deck with water from the ship’s fire hydrants shortly before launch would be a pretty good fire prevention and damage mitigation measure.
Sad news. The Cavanaugh Flight Museum (Addison TX) has closed for good. I hope it resurfaces somewhere else. If not I wonder if the AF Museum can snag their CASA 2.111.