PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Pitot Tubes interconnection
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Old 26th Jul 2009, 08:25
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Genghis the Engineer
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I don't know the specific aircraft but, from a certification viewpoint, it's probably just treated as a single tube that happens to have two holes.

So long as the combined system is calibrated as such, I can't see a particular problem, regardless of any US military regulations to the contrary. Almost certainly if one pitot were to block, that would throw the calibrations and create some variation in airspeed indication errors away from those shown in the aircraft manual. On the other hand, the situation is altogether more serious if the aircraft has only one pitot and that blocks!

The main issue, I'd think, with such a system is knowing whether a single pitot has become blocked between flights thus creating a system error which you might be carrying for considerable time if not detected.

Behaviour in sideslip seems likely to me to be neither better nor worse than any other aeroplane, depending upon the positioning of the pitots - poor behaviour of a pitot-static system in sideslip is usually down to poor static positioning rather than pitot issues.

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