From the Grauniad. Surely there would be multiple pitots. Could there be a software problem in "voting" in event of discrepancies??
A pilot's analysis
You look at this as an A330 pilot and it's a case of there but for the grace of God. The first sign of trouble was the expectation of turbulence voiced by the first officer. He reduced the speed in anticipation to Mach 0.82, which is normal, and warned the crew. Shortly after entering the turbulence and associated ice, the autopilot disengaged and the first officer commented that the flight control computers had disconnected. This happened because the computers were no longer receiving speed information and neither were the pilots.
I cannot speculate why the pilot climbed the aircraft but it could have been due to confusion caused by the turbulence and sudden instrument failure. The controls at very high altitude are very sensitive and there is only a very small speed envelope, often called "coffin corner", where only a few knots of speed up or down can cause a stall.
So you are flying in this little window of a flight envelope which is perfectly normal and, indeed, you do it every day. But if you are suddenly handed control of an aircraft you can breathe on that little stick and the aircraft can go down one degree. In a very short space of time lost speed and stalled, causing it to fall from the sky. Despite what the pilots must have been going through in the cockpit, the pitch attitude remained fairly constant throughout so the passengers would not have sensed something was seriously wrong. They would have felt mild buffeting of the stalled airflow over the wings and the initial sinking feeling. That's all.
I feel a lot of empathy for the pilots. One could imagine suddenly suffering a total loss of airspeed indication in turbulence in the middle of the night and with all the autopilot systems suddenly failing. The indications, both visual and aural, would have been very confusing. The question for me is why did the instruments that are triple redundant, which means that there are three back-ups, all fail together?
Anonymous A330 pilot