Originally Posted by
Clandestino
How do you know that when the chips are down he won't just jettison everything he was taught and revert to some deeply rooted notion of his which might be flawed, even fatally?
As a Non-Front Office resident (aka SLF) I was always hoping the Sim Checks would help to find this out. Looking at this truly unfortunate accident and the findings as to how it unfolded however, I' afraid you might be right, though...
Although I'm not really convinced that more automatisms will do any good to correct this from a more enigneering perspective I am positive that the aircraft could have known its actual flight attitude at least roughly. A combination of Integral over G loads in all 3 axis versus GPS data would have given a flight path and attitude over Ground. That leaves out wind speed but even that could have been factored in as a trend based on history data of the previous 5 minutes or so when it was still reliable. In case of unreliable air speed an average over the last (couple of) minutes with 'good' data should be a suitable and sufficient working hypothesis.
Based on that information there should be a possibility to give Pilots more indication of the actual attitude and situation even if all Air data is lost or considered unreliable.
We will see if a Manufacturer will go into that direction even though we should hope that the lesson of AF447 has been learned world wide.