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Old 29th Jun 2009, 23:22
  #2516 (permalink)  
24victor
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
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More complexity coming

When three pitot heads are rendered inop due to external influences, in this case supposed icing of some description, the design represent a single point of failure. Three heads are the minimum required to allow triplex redundancy and voting logic but if they are all overwhelmed by the same event the number no longer matters. Five, ten, a hundred - they will all succumb in the same way at the same time.

Now that the potential for multiple pitot heads to be offlined by a single meterological phenomena has been clearly established by the recent spate of incidents, the current system, shown to have no redundancy to this catastrophic failure mode, becomes a single point of failure in the safety analysis and as such will have to be addressed.

An alternate system will need to be developed which delivers accurate airspeed without using M. Pitot's somewhat ancient approach.

Rgds.
24V
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