lyman appears to believe
I don't think anybody including himself really knows what he believes, in any case most of the time he's just making up stuff. Steer clear if you want to maintain any level of sanity.
1. pick the most likely correct instrument and use it to judge the others and hope you choose wisely or 2. assume that NONE of them are correct and methodically work your way through a troubleshooting flow chart (on paper or from memory, either way).
I agree we're not seeing much of option 2 here, but I also have a hard time imagining indications that rationally should have lead to the inputs made. Perhaps we need to consider 3. Freeze and stare into the headlights. A very natural reaction to a dangerous situation, deeply hardcoded into our reptile brain, no matter how smart you are. Only to be overcome by training...
The Airbus philosophy would appear to be one of protecting the airframe from the pilot. Somehow this went horribly wrong.
Well, in this case (like any other old a/c) there were no more hard protections, period. This reversion was based on the assumption that a computer acting on unreliable data is much worse news than a well trained pilot trying to make sense of the situation. I assume out of context of this incident most here would have wholeheartedly agreed with this?
If I could go and change one thing and prevent this accident, I would say that would be: train the pilots to ignore everything but pitch and power in the event of any instrument abnormality.
Though one would have hoped that this was already the most basic piloting instinct...
If I could go and change any one thing to have helped them recover from this accident, it would be: put the stall warning system on WOW (weigh on wheels, or air/ground) switch so that it would not bias out at taxi speed and below.
Certainly a good idea, though it should be noted that they had almost a minute of proper stall warning (plus there not being any need to stall the plane at all). I can't think of any reason not to improve the stall warning logic, but if you're that slow and in the air you probably need a lot more than a reliable stall warning to get out of this...