Originally Posted by
ChristiaanJ
AFAIK, all of them are still being qualified/certified against an obsolete standard, and so far I still have NOT seen any 'news' about the standard itself actually having been updated/improved, to take into account the environment that AF447 encountered.
The issue is one of all engineering being a compromise to some degree - there is no such thing as a 100% reliable way to measure airspeed in all conditions (in fact one could argue that there is no 100% reliable way to do anything). Being mechanically very simple in principle, along with the fact that there have only been two fairly recent fatal accidents on the line involving failure of the pitot system - and only one where the design of the pitot tube itself is suspect - I'd wager a guess that it is simply the most reliable of the alternatives on offer.
Airbus's response to when the pitot system does fail is the BUSS module, but the way the BUSS calculates airspeed is more complex than that of the pitot system and as such it is better suited to a secondary role.