Aircraft

On climb out, a loud tapping was heard and suspected to come from the front of the Sundowner 23.

On takeoff I recognized the stall warning horn and an abnormal pitch up after rotation. I immediately provided full forward pressure on the stick and received no response. I proceeded to reduce power and add full forward trim, which lowered the nose of the aircraft. It became clear that the plane did not have elevator control.

I declared “my controls” and my student froze on the controls and failed to follow procedure. By the time I was able to get him to respond, the aircraft was past the taxiway edge, and the right main gear struck the light.

When the AP would not disengage I pushed the disengage button on the yoke. When that didn’t work, I pulled the circuit breaker to the autopilot. That didn’t work either, the servos refused to release.

As I was holding the nose up my instructor said “my controls.” In my mind I wasn’t sure why he wanted to take control. We were stable and about to touchdown, but I immediately removed my hands from the flight controls and said “your controls.” I didn’t know if he saw something I did not.

Another contributing factor may have been pilot of Aircraft Y aggressively maneuvering to “get back at” Aircraft X for confusion of sequence in run-up pad prior to departure.

We heard a transmission on the Tower frequency as we were entering the Delta airspace from another plane reporting they were nearly hit in the same vicinity that we were in.

We were able to see fuel leaking from the right tank while in flight, so we diverted to ZZZ and requested priority sequencing due to our fuel loss. We were able to see the fuel gauge dropping in level.