Originally Posted by
HundredPercentPlease
Edmund,
You make some good points, albeit scattered with understandable inaccuracies owing to your lack of insight.
Firstly, many heroes on here will shout "fools", without understanding that sometimes the diagnosis of UAS is difficult. In essence, you see something that doesn't make sense. The pitch/power/speed relationship is wrong and the FD is doing something odd. A modern pilot is suckered into believing the FD, and may have trouble working out which parameter is out - and may decide to disbelieve the pitch (for example).
Once diagnosed as UAS, we have trained procedures that are designed to work IFR. It's no good relying on anything visual, as you may not have it - and even if you do it can be fatally misleading. But most procedures are the same - establish onto a known flightpath (often a climb thrust with a certain pitch) while you get the book out and find some settings to level out when above MSA. From there, you can carefully plan and then execute a stable instrument approach. It's hard work, but if trained well and practised regularly, not the end of the world at all.
Your final point is also interesting. It's very easy for an airline to employ pilots who, through no fault of their own, are only well-versed in normal operations with high levels of automation (including FD etc). In the old days, pilots flew normally with low levels of automation (my first commercial aircraft had no map, autopilot, autothrust and so on). So losing ASI was obvious, and all the pitch/power settings were known and used daily. Nowadays we don't have that, so it has to be well trained and practised in the simulator. This is expensive and difficult, and requires wealthy airlines with good safety culture. This is hard to legislate for.
HundredPercentPlease
You are saying that *by design* a single blocked orifice (pitot or static vent) can put the pilot's control systems in a state such that conventionnally trained and certified airplane pilots will quite reasonably be expected to lose control and terminate in an encounter with terrain at speed, even though control surfaces and engines are fully functional. As an engineer, I would call this a clear case of absence of redundancy, and cannot understand that such a design would obtain certification.
My impression is that in current generation aircraft there are now more fatalities arising from airspeed instrument anomalies than from uncontained engine failures.
Please forgive me for again stating the obvious, but it may be time that some adults were brought in to revise instrumentation design in a world in which more and more pilots are needed to fly more and more airliners, and the actual mechanical systems have become very reliable.
Edmund