I agree with the need for a pitot tube alternative. While the pitot tube may have been around for a 100 years, and works without incident most of the time (esp. with pitot heat), when conditions for icing, etc exist, all the redundant pitot tubes on the plane are susceptible to the the same kind of failure.
It would be great if aircraft, in addition to the pitot tube, had some other mechanism (as suggested by posters earlier) which can be used to cross-verify pitot tube readings in failure scenarios.