Not quite, otherwise they would make the Warthog look cheap, but they have a reputation for lasting decades, for a while around the year 2000 they also refurbished the old serial and gameport devices if you sent it to them so many have 20 years old sticks still going strong.
From experience I can say they use a very sturdy textured plastic that feels very different from all the sticks I had before, from what I've read around the internet it's supposed to be a polymer injected with fiberglass, and the buttons and hat switches are made from the same material.
They do (or at least did at some point) seem to make actually aircraft controls. This plastic is the same kind that you can find in Boeings (polymer+fiberglass, I think that some cars use it, too). Not metal like on Warthog, but not your common plastic, either. IIRC, they do not make any notable military aircraft stuff, just civil aviation. I don't think the aircraft parts look much like their gaming controllers, either. Those have more in common with sticks and switches meant for industrial machinery (which is still a good recommendation, that's probably why they're so indestructible), which is pretty logical given the design requirements.
I think it's safe to assume their couple hundred dollar consumer joysticks are not manufactured to the same degree of quality as their multi-thousand dollar real counterparts.
Naturally, quality control has to be
much tighter in actual aircraft control than in gaming controllers. Of course, I don't know
which aircraft they make controls for, so there's a chance that as far as those go, they're restricted to things like a position light switches for Beechcrafts and the like. The point (in the article that mentioned that) was their expertise with various types of "professional" control systems.
That said, as I mentioned, parts for gaming controllers probably don't have much in common with parts meant for aircraft. They definitely share parts with CH's industrial controller lines, though. The website is now a bit of a mess, CH website now only has gaming stuff, everything professional seems to have moved to APEM website (seems like they're now its subsidiary), which has no mention of aircraft, so I couldn't really find anything concrete. BTW, found this gem while browsing their FAQ
:
I'm building a robot in my parent's basement with the hopes of global domination. Can I use one of your joysticks to control such an army?
Yes you can! In fact, APEM supplies thousands of joysticks specifically for robotics control. The most often used joysticks for such applications are the Miniature resistives, HF and TS Series.
