There's an
interesting article in New Scientist this week about a novel microphone technology. It involves tiny parallel strips of platinum electrically heated to around 200 Celsius, measuting the near-instantaneous cooling effect of impinging air molecules. The thermal inertia of the system is so low that it's possible to extract a lot of information about the direction and velocity of the air molecules - enough to distinguish conversations twenty metres away, for example, while processing out the unwanted noise.
It strikes me that this would be a very good technology for measuring air speed on aircraft, mostly because it should be very viable to deploy hundreds if not thousands of them per installation. You don't need very many failures in a pitot-tube based system to remove all useful data about airspeed (as we keep seeing), but if you could make the entire skin of an aircraft sensitive to velocity/pressure/temperature you could end up with a very much more robust system. I
We don't limit our personal environmental skin sensors to one or two patches on our body, after all. Comms/power/processing requirements for such a system won't be trivial, but we're very good at doing those robustly and cheaply these days.