Surely they've reached the 21 century and don't rely on pitot tubes alone.
Surely X,Y,Z GPS with over-the-land interpolated speed which should agree
with the pitot figures when wind speed taken is taken into account.


I'm going by military specs of the F117 which NEEDS 3 working pitots
or it cannot be flown. Don't know how many pitots a 330 has but
certainly the fly by wire systems have similarities, this is just my
assumption remember. For immediate control of the aircraft, the
computers need at lease 3 axis of information for fundamental control.
Since the pitot has been around forever I again assume they play a
very large role in the guidance systems.

My flying oppo says that there are speed inputs from the inertial nav and
GPS, but that the pitot input is the speed data of primary reliability,
precisely because it is a simple device, and a 'known', as you say, for many
many years.

I put the lunchtime news on today to see if there had been any further
announcements. In the section "coming up in today's programme", they showed
pictures of the tail floating in the ocean, with divers standing on it, and
made some comments about that being found, and the body count now being up
to 29. Then they said words to the effect of "investigators are still
focusing on erroneous data from external speed sensors, being the cause of
the 'accident' ". However, when it came to the actual news item playing some
time later in the show, there was absolutely no further mention of this, and
almost all of the item concentrated on pictures of the wreckage, and the
base where bodies are being taken. Strange. I wonder whether the original
comment was just a leftover from yesterday when they were saying this, put
in to time-pad the excerpt, or whether the broadcast was edited on the fly
to take out this aspect for some reason ...

Arfa