Food for thought-
Boeing also came out with the warning that their airplanes weren't built to take the rapid alternating full scale deflection of the rudder either.
A fact that was a big surprise to pretty much everybody I know since after all, if you are below the limiting speed----most of us thought stop to stop to stop wasn't even a factor---just as it is in small planes.
Another issue- AA was pretty upset with AB because there was a prior incident (over the Carib an AB went out of control and severely overstressed the rudder--stress level went well beyond the load limit {for you composite haters, had that rudder been metal it would have failed----design load limit for composite components is higher than that required for metal}) The data was sent to AB who never informed AA how close they came to losing a jet...info that might have prevented the subsequent mishap over NY.
The rudder displacement, a couple of inches left and right doesn't [I]seem[I] like it should be displacing the rudder that much, but in this case it was pretty much all the rudder the plane was going to give him. I will admit that i have no idea how much distance it takes to put the pedal to the stop, but it seems to be in the neighborhood of about 6 inches....but, seems to me like the FO was trying to lead his aileron input with a little bit of rudder. Maybe mis-applying the high AOA training AA had put him through, or a habit pattern transferred over from small airplanes vs. just riding the wave out just using airlerons.
Doesn't really matter why the FO did what he did. Question is have we all internalized the lessons from this mishap to keep it from occurring again?