Originally Posted by
Winnerhofer
If there's one bone bigger than the other to pick is just who the hell kept on approving Thales' Pitots??
Because, in a regulatory sense, the Thales AA pitot tube was still technically fit for purpose. Have a look at this article from 2009:
Airbus backs overhaul of pitot icing certification standards - 12/13/2009 - Flight Global
Originally Posted by Flight Global
[EASA] opened a consultation in August on revising ETSO C16 - which was based on decades-old criteria - to align it with the US Federal Aviation Administration's more modern standard TSO C16a.
But Airbus ... has expressed "significant concerns" about the adoption of the updated requirements.
It claims that the icing conditions laid out in the USA standard are "not sufficiently conservative" and that icing test requirements are lower than the airframer's own.
Airbus says the [FAA TSO C16a] standard does not require probes to be tested in ice-crystal or mixed-phase icing, despite their sensitivity to these conditions.
So while EASA's certification criteria were less up-to-date than the FAA's, it would appear that even the later FAA standard does not take this form of icing into account, and consequently the Thales AA pitot probe would have passed certification in the US too.
Weren't 40+ incidents enough?
Closer to 30, and not all of them involved the Thales probes, the Goodrich models could still have issues if the conditions were severe enough. Avoiding bad weather in an aircraft is not just for the sake of not wanting a bumpy ride!
Ultimately, prior to this accident the aviation industry did not consider temporary loss of airspeed indication to be a significant threat - just set pitch and power if necessary and the aircraft will take care of itself until the blockage clears.
In a purely technical sense, this aircraft did not crash because of the blocked pitot probes, it crashed because the instinctive reaction of the pilot flying was inappropriate - and this was not caught and corrected by the rest of the flight crew.
PS: Winnerhofer, you seem to have an intense personal animosity towards the French authorities - how come?