I was once in an F-16 backseat, night, on the boom, exhorting my over-correcting student to let go of the throttle. It's a technique we talked about to make your corrections more deliberate and less nervous. Quite honestly in the viper, once you get on the boom you should make very few throttle corrections, just slowly bumping it up as your jet gets heavier.

Well, he was so stressed out, he let go of the stick instead. Thank God he had a lot of nose down trim in. I didn't know what had happened, except that we rapidly fell off the boom and I took the jet. About 5 minutes later the student finally fessed up to what had caused him to nose dive off the boom.