Time to look to see if the same supplier provided pitot tubes to Boeing.
I said the very same thing on Airliners.net. I wonder if both Airbus and Boeing need to look at re-engineering the whole pitot tube design, especially given pitot tube’s susceptibility to clogging due to foreign objects and ice.
I thought these newer jets were supposed to have multiple sensors for redundancy.
AF447 was 10 years ago. there are literally thousands upon thousands of these things in operation every hour of every day; if it was a defective design, planes would be crashing twice a day.
it’s going to turn out to be a maintenance issue. this device gave ample warning it was about to go out, and the the discount airline discounted them all.
High humidity in that area and then at altitude they froze over - however - checklist calls out pitot heat ON. There are other means to check what’s going on with airspeed indications and how to over ride.
-— Airbus had problems with pitot tubes that led to the crash of Air France flight 447. -—
I just watched a video report of this crash. The pitot tubes did freeze up as the plane passed through a storm. This freezing is not unusual and would have cleared itself in a minute or so. This caused the 2 flight officers to take improper “corrective” action which led to the plane stalling and plunging into the sea. The captain was on break and out of the cockpit.
The real cause of this disaster was the appalling errors of the two crew members in the cockpit. One was pulling the stick back to pull up the nose while the other was pushing the stick down to gain speed. They didn’t look at their instruments or realize that they were counteracting each other. By the time the captain got back to the cockpit it was too late. This accident was completely preventable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5LUGaW6TyE
-PJ