ATSB has just released its report into an A330 incident over Malaysia. It may have some relevence to the AF447 mystery.
It canvasses issues with weather radar capability, detection of high altitude icing, sudden temperature increase, and associated extreme turbulence within an undetected and unforecasted tropical storm, in darkness and at similar latitude, season/month and time of day as the AF447 incident.
FDR records show an almost instantaneous change of 150 degrees in wind direction, coincident with wind speed changing rapidly through a sequence of 20kts->5kts->38kts->20kts through that direction change causing loss of 650m altitude via a -0.48G vertical acceleration, followed by a +1.59G vertical acceleration (rated as severe turbulence). This was associated with a sudden temperature increase and the unexpected sound of ice hitting cockpit windows. I note that all injuries were with people unrestrained by seatbelts just like recovered bodies from AF447, indicating an unexpected incident with no warning to passengers (or flight crew?)
Even though I am a strong supporter of automation I have reservations based on the concerns that many are expressing about its implementation. But in questioning its role in the AF447 accident are we sometimes getting too narrowly focused on the technology thats employed in the parts of automation and concluding that other incidents such as this Malaysian incident and others over Western Australia and the Carribean etc are different or not relevent to this higher level issue because they use different brand/model of instruments? My experience with automation is that interfaces between components should be such that model/brand/technology should be irrelevent as long as the interface specifications are set in concrete and rigidly adhered to. Yet I see some argue that some of the above and other incidents are irrelevent to AF447 because they have different models of pitot....or different levels of software/microcode etc. Iisnt it a governance and design issue?