[expatpat]

Was the aircraft in VFC or IFC at the time of the incident? If in VFC, the true horizon was there to fly the correct pitch by, so it was presumably in IFC, flying only on the instruments. In IFC at 30,000 ft, it was probably in a thunderstorm. Why did it fly into a thunderstorm when TX cells can be seen from miles away before you reach them? Of course, if the storm was a severe squall-line, they may have had no choice.

If the pilot was getting high airspeed readings from the computers, then he did the correct thing to raise the nose if he didn't trust the other instruments (the plane must not be allowed to go into a dive and exceed NTE speed, because it will start to break up).

A quad-redundancy FCS might well have allowed it to sort out the mixed signals, but that's another story. I know Boeing was interested in using quad-R, but I don't know whether they have it in their production aircraft.

[dozer7]

“If the pilot was getting high airspeed readings from the computers,”

I believe there are 3 air data computers on this aircraft and multiple pitot tubes and AOA vanes. If the ADCs don’t agree there would be a CAS message for ADC miscompare. I think there would be an overspeed warning. Did the auto throttle disengage with the over speed?

It is being presented as complete failure of the air data system. I have been in flight test for 30 years and have never heard of catastrophic failure of the air data system. something else is going on here.

regards

dozer