TiiberiusKirk
KTAS (True Air Speed), i.e. the speed the aircraft is actually travelling through an air mass, has nothing in common with the GS (Ground Speed). Consider an aircraft with 250 KTAS and a tail wind of 100 KTS. It will have a GS of 350KTS, and likewise 150KTS if it was pushing a 100KT head wind.
The aircraft performs relative to the airmass which it is in.
mm43
Actually TiiberiusKirk makes a good point. GPS knows accelerations which integrated provide speed and the again provide distance in all axis. GPS routinely provides wind and true speed and direction and distance and thereby navigation information.
It would not be much of a stretch for GPS to be programmed to provide synthetic pressure altitude (as opposed to GPS alt) and also synthetic calibrated airspeed. This data could easily be compared to the triple air data sources that are measured by the pitot probes and static pressure sensors for validation.
I suspect that this or a very similar system will be part of the next gen aircraft.
Edit: Hazlenuts39 is correct (see next post). I used the term GPS when I meant to use IRS. IRS of course uses accelerations and integrates to achieve calculation of velocity and distance to give position. GPS of course knows position and works backwards to calculate velocities.
I still think it is merely an engineering problem to work a solution to provide synthetic airspeed and pressure altitude using normal air data and IRS/GPS information in conjunction to provide an alternative source of reliable data when an input sensor system is completely eliminated on a temporary basis (icing of all probes for example).