Originally Posted by
The FUB
Does this A320 variety suffer at all from Ice Crystal Icing? Any operators have first or second hand experience of this on a A320 series?
There's an EASA proposed AD (PAD 14-139 Date: 09 September 2014) which appears to potentially apply to all A320 series, but the critical factor appears to be which variety of probe is fitted. (The PAD does not specify what the replacement probe is to be, just what is to be removed and is no longer allowed; I seem to recall that at one time there was a suggestion that this was a "Thales/Sextant problem" and some operators were intentionally introducing "mixed" probe configurations (Goodrich mixed with Thales) as a kind of "insurance" again this being a design flaw, but I think there have been Goodrich incidents since, so that theory may have been discredited.
But perhaps a more important point is that practically all pitot probes are vulnerable to the ice crystal phenomenom; until very recently, nothing in the certification of probe addressed it at all, so any robustness one design might have had was as much luck as by design.