I am far from convinced that there are many "spurious protection triggers" or "dumb designer mistakes". No, I am not a pilot
Yes it is quite clear to see that! I have seen guys & girls cancel genuine warnings because they are so used to cancelling a nuisance warning at a particular phase of flight....
All the talk on this thread of stalling may or may not be related to the accident in question, we will soon find out, but let me give the non pilots some practical info.
Is it possible to get a stall warning and a high speed warning go off at once without it being spurious?
Yes! Coffins corner.
All it would take is an updraft, especially when in bad weather and in turbulance. Descending to a lower altitude with increased margins between low speed and high speed is the only thing that will save your neck.
Put yourself in this situation. In moderate / severe turbulence at high level naturally only a few knots from low speed stall due to the G. Static tubes /smart probes ice up due to super cooled water droplets, first indication is that you are over speeding. If either you or the automatics reduce the power you are in a whole world of trouble.
To save your neck, recognition of the situation must be instant which is most likely not a practical stance.
You realise within a few seconds 'oh we must have unreliable airspeed' you decide to fly a sensible attitude and power as per the book, but guess what? it's already too late as you've already stalled the wing due to the initial reduction of power and / or severe turbulence.
So you now need to initiate a stall recovery but by this stage you don't trust any of your instruments so continue to fly that sensible attitude and power which you have been trained to do. It's very likely the instruments will be telling you that you are flying straight and level due to frozen ports. You are actually stalled and descending at 7000 + ft/min and you or the plane can't make sense of all the conflicting information before your eyes and that unfortunately is game over.
A good crew will recover from the above situation but the best solution is avoidance. Avoid the weather ahead, don't attempt to climb over and if you must go through or if you hit nasty turbulence, descend to a lower altitude immediately where your margins are increased and you buy yourself time to recognise the problem and carry out the sensible actions before it's already too late.
This is why a human brain will always be required in a flight deck to analyse and pre empt future problems.
Pilotless airliners? No thanks
