BOAC...
I would have expected an aircraft, which is supposed to be all things to all pilots, to know when 2 of its 3 PRIMARY sensors have 'failed' and therefore disagreed with the third.
I am not sure they are "primary sensors"? The fact is the aircraft flew nigh on normally with 2 of them failed / stuck. The report at some point discussed them as "stall warning devices" in certificaiton terms... and they are "triple redundancy" in this, in that with only 1 working, they still got a (correct) stall warning.
We must understand that in normal ops, it would take an <10-6 scenario to replicate this as an accident. It would require a multiple AoA failure (improbable), followed by a crew flying at Vref-20K or less, with all the characteristics of an approaching stall (low IAS, high nose attitude). Therefore to relate the design in this area to normal ops is stretching things. I suspect the AoA probes would "report" themselves as faulty in the PFR, so again, for an accident to occur in normal ops, the low speed scenario would have to occur on the 1st flight post the common maint error.
I cannot get away form the fact this was an HF accident - and those factors are not confined to the pilots, but also to the airlines who "tasked" them. It is a bit much to blame the aircraft design for "not saving" such reckless and ill thought out testing of those very AoA system(s).
For those who say "but the pilots should have been told the AoAs disagreed"... Why? We don't fly the Airbus on AoA! The only people who "need to know" the AoAs are dodgy are those who fly the test profiles... who it might be assumed know what to look for (as the report says, it was patently obvious the AoA info was faulty by the Alpha Max/Prot indications).
NoD