Indeed, Will. And despite lawyers and cultural norms, sometimes <censored> happens.
I suspect that describes the situation better than a lot of commentary here. The burr under my saddle is a desire to find the contributing causes, not a apportion any sort of blame. With the data I want engineers can work to prevent it happening again. And I am just techie enough that I would enjoy hearing outlines of ideas for improvement of equipment such as people have had.
One such idea is new pitots. An even better idea is being adopted, probably for the wrong reason, with two new probes and one old Thales probe on the same plane. Different probes give different failure mechanisms, even if only slightly different. That would give computers something to chew on.
One idea I've entertained is phase tracking GPS as a means of detecting attitude using three or better four antennas, wing-tips, aft, and optionally forward. The GPS pretty much has to be tracking carrier phase to derive meaningful attitude data. The nice thing about phase tracking GPS is that you don't need to know precisely where you are to determine relative differences in position of nearby locations to surprising degrees of precision. The breaking point for this is that this does not account for up or down drafts that are not perfectly up and down. At some altitudes flying over mountain ranges can give winds at rather odd angles, I've observed on the ground. I don't know if that holds at altitude.
What I don't know is whether floating such technical ideas in the group to see what actual pilots salute and what they kiss off is within this group's purview.
JD-EE