What a horrible Catch-22.
The diagnosis appears to be, from the leak (I realize that isn't the whole picture) airspeed unreliable, pilots thus unaware of actual aircraft performance, and they must make a nose/pitch decision to control aircraft when X event happens. (Nose pitch up? Stall warning based on AoA? High speed warning from otto due to approaching? No, scratch that one, airspeed not reliable ... )
If you don't know your actual airspeed, you may change pitch in the wrong direction (see what the guy in Buffalo did a while back, wrong input to a stall scenario) as you either approach Mach limits, or you approach high speed stall. If you guess wrong in the corrective input, you make the situation worse. Hell of a coin to flip there, and not a lot of time to ponder.
Granted, maybe "pitch and power we had set a moment ago" is the proper response with a flurry of error reports and warning audio going off? But to get to that decision you have to figure out the first issue, that your airspeed (a triple redundant sytem and a primary performance indicator) has gone awry. How long does that take, what are the cues? Aside: Over at tech log sub forum, poster
takata has some interesting info on airspeed sensing failures from Airbus, a few years old.
Is task/sensory overload an issue? Someone at Tech Log mentioned the plethora of warnings and ECAMS messages for the Qantas A380 turbine disk loss ... were the gents in AF 447 similarly assaulted by a lot of warnings at once?
To top it off, you have no AoA indicator in the cockpit (do I have that right, in the A330, no AoA gage to read?). AoA gage might help you direct the attitude to set acceptable performance, while you sort out what is wrong with your airspeed sensing system.
AoA is the basis for some of the protections built into the various laws for Airbus flight control system, but pilots don't have an AoA gage.
Would having an AoA gage have been helpful to this crew, I wonder?
