Quote, Mac the Knife:
"Hi Guys, sorry to bother you but my airspeed sensors are momentarily unreliable and so autopilot and autothrottle will disconnect."
"Flight data was nominal when this happened and SOP in this situation is to maintain appropriate pitch and power while we sort it out."
Would you like to do that yourselves or shall I take care of it?"
Seriously, wouldn't that (or a more formal equivalent) have been a more helpful introduction to the situation than a flashing UAS alert & prompt disconnect?"
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-That does seem way more like it...
I find it amazing the Autopilot just dumps everything on the pilot suddenly, but there is no reminder there is no stall protection or other "Normal Law" limiters now...
And to top it off, the "Normal law" limitations do not come back on when the airspeeds agree again...
Also, clearly the lack of clear visibility of the out-of-the-way side control joystick, combined with the lack of synchronization of movements with the other side, makes matters even worse as to clarifying the situation...
This reminds a lot of the Roll partial Autopilot-disengage feature (after applying roll for x seconds) of the Airbus Autopilot, which partially disengages the Autopilot for roll control only, a previously little understood feature devoid of much warning apparently, which killed that Russian captain who had his kid sitting at the controls (and all the passengers)...
I think also to have some other completely independent speed indicator, like a GPS, could be a back-up of last resort to form a mental picture of what is really going on (regardless of the mental gym of correcting the GPS value)... Here the system is very "brittle", because even the control tower will relay information from the same faulty source if the aircraft pitot fails! That killed a bunch of people as well...
It is very hard to form a mental picture of what is going on, if you suddenly have reason to be suspicious of the basic parameters of everything... At least with the GPS, you would have confidence the data is pointing you in the right direction...
One poster here quite rightly pointed out the first warning in blocked pitot tubes is sometimes the rudder ratio overspeed, which requires making mental loops backwards to figure out what this could mean: This is just poor "interface ergonomics" (if that term makes sense)...
Someone said there was no incidence indicator on the Airbus, the most relevant data to aircraft behaviour, other than the "Stall" warning itself... I find that strange...
I think they need some mass-market designers to help design these cockpits and functions in a more intuitively useable way...
G.