On the Citation I used to fly many years ago there was an excellent AoA meter and we found that with a little practice we could determine the weight of the plane in-flight to within 100kg, and by using the meter the other way we could get our speed accurate to within a few knots as well on departure and approach.
I'd love to see them fitted and used more often in larger aeroplanes, and also used in the sim in emergencies. They take a little getting used to, but once you do they are fine.

The system just needs to be designed to avoid single point failures....

Pitot tubes
 

Ice would also affect the angle of attack vane just as it would the pitot tube.
I don't see why GPS ground speed could not be corrected for altitude, temperature etc to produce CAS/EAS.

Thermostat, “Ice would also affect the angle of attack vane just as it would the pitot tube”.
Not so for ice crystal icing – probably a significant feature in AF447.
Ice crystals would more likely bounce off an AOA vane (as for wings etc), because there is little forward facing heated surface area to give partial melting, a requirement for this type of ice to form. Also the free stream air-flow angle and particle speed around a vane would make adherence unlikely, whereas crystals being 'trapped' in a partially closed heated tube provides ideal conditions, particularly if the crystal mass flow is high.
Conventional icing appears to be well contained by existing pitot heating.

Thermostat

Ground speed, whether derived from IRS or GPS inputs, would have to have an air data input i.e a pitot and temp probe input to produce CAS/EAS. Your statement answers itself. Without air data, ground speed is useless for what you want. Pitot and Rosemount inputs are not going away.

Thermostat, how would an onboard system derive TAS, EAS, CAS and, finally, IAS from a ground speed (GPS sourced or otherwise) without knowing wind speed first?

The assertion that ice would affect both pitots and vanes similarly is unproven and not very well founded, i suspect.

Yes, ice (outside the design envelope) may affect pitot systems. Ice outside the design envelope may also affect vanes.

But the probability that both systems, which have some significant dissimilarity in their sensing methodology, would be similarly affected by icing is quite unlikely. Even if both systems are affected by "extreme icing", the chances that they start to be affected at the same time, and furthermore in a fashion which is complementary (so that no comparison system could spot an anomaly), appear at first thought to be small.

There are no AOA vanes on the aircraft I work on. The AOA value is calculated from data received from the "Smartprobes", which is what Honeywell calls the pitot probes in this system.

Just sayin'.

One could also ask why, after more than a hundred years of technology advances, the aviation industry still uses those big, clumsy, ice-prone things called wings to produce lift. There must exist a better way, yes?


Well, as we know, no. I guess the discussion about pitot tubes comes from the fact that they are used to sense a property which is ultimately displayed on an electronic display. Thus people tend to assume that the sensor could also be subject to the same rapid technology evolution as the digital electronics.

But in fact the airspeed sensor sits as the interface between the physical world, which basically does not change, and the digital world.

AoA would IMO be the closest alternative to measure relevant airspeed or dynamic pressure, but as others have said, it seems its benefits have still not outweighed its disadvantages.

Indeed. And that leaves you and your aircraft exposed to certain common cause failures which could affect not just airspeed and altitude display, but also stall protection and warning. Causing the handling of those failure cases to be significantly more problematic than with reliance on multiple dissimilar technologies.