Quasiconformal planes with bi-Lipschitz pieces and extensions of almost affine maps

A quasiplane $f(V)$ is the image of an $n$-dimensional Euclidean subspace $V$ of ${\Bbb R}^N$ ($1\leq n\leq N-1$) under a quasiconformal map $f:{\Bbb R}^N\to{\Bbb R}^N$ . We give sufficient conditions in terms of the weak quasisymmetry constant of the underlying map for a quasiplane to be a bi-Lipschitz $n$-manifold and for a quasiplane to have big pieces of bi-Lipschitz images of ${\Bbb R}^n$. One main novelty of these results is that we analyze quasiplanes in arbitrary codimension $N-n$. To establish the big pieces criterion, we prove new extension theorems for "almost affine" maps, which are of independent interest. This work is related to investigations by Tukia and V\"ais\"al\"a on extensions of quasisymmetric maps with small distortion.