Originally Posted by jcjeant
Remove from the plane the Pitot tube and you have no more speed measuring system at all
Brown soft stinky material such as emanates from the South end of a North facing fertile male bovine.
The inertial and the GPS systems are still working. They may not know your air speed within 60 kts and your altitude likely well within 100'. BUT, it does know the plane had better not be touching the ground when the ground speed is over say 200 kts or even only 120kts and if the AoA is excessive for the given ground speed politely slap the pilot with a dead fish and tell him he's stalled. (Which would have done no good because the PF thought he was doing the correct stall drill, apparently. Where he dreamed it up, nobody quite knows.)
Furthermore, if the last pitot reading was 275, the pitch of the aircraft is about normal, and the thrust is about normal you can pretty decently presume 5 minutes later you're still going roughly the same speed at roughly the same altitude even if the GPS set has gone toes up.
Now, the design of the plane may have hidden some of this data from the PF or the PF had not been trained to find and use it. But the plane bloody well knows in one of its computin' thangs.