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Comment by ars_technician | Hacker News Reader

I agree; however, the Air France incident you are referring to is when the airspeed indicator was locked due to a frozen pitot tube, wasn't it? That seems like a much less blatant failure on the part of the pilots.

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You may have already read this, but if not, this is an incredibly chilling reconstruction of the events leading up to that crash:

Key excerpt from halfway through:

"Another of the pitot tubes begins to function once more. The cockpit's avionics are now all functioning normally. The flight crew has all the information that they need to fly safely, and all the systems are fully functional. The problems that occur from this point forward are entirely due to human error."

Really tragic.

Right, but how does the cockpit crew know that they airspeed indicators are working correctly now? They don't.

Popular Mechanics did a mesmerizing writeup of the Air France transcript. Worth a read:

Read the report. The pitot tubes thawed after about one minute. Everything after was pilot error. After the high-altitutde stall, the pilot-in-control kept the angle of attack above 30 degrees.

All pilots are trained to recognize issues like a frozen pitot tube and there is a very simple solution - activate pitot heat and maintain level flight using your attitude indicator until your airspeed indicator starts working again.

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