Air France 447 Crash Mystery May Be Completely Unmysterious
Preliminary Air France 447 black box info! (Preliminary, in air crash investigations, means "take with a grain of salt.") So, according to reporters, the airspeed sensors got all icy, and the autopilot turned off, and the plane stalled, and then… well. It's definitely premature to assign any blame to the co-pilots who were in the cockpit, so we won't! These reports still seem incomplete: even small-craft pilots-in-training know what to do in a stall: you pick up speed, using something really complex called "gravity," and you un-stall. (According to another reporter, the plane was in a steep climb instead.)
This also means the Times magazine got lucky for their fascinating if also premature story on the flight, as they focused quite a bit on pitot probe failures.
aren't the pitot probes and the airspeed sensors the same thing? From the Times article you linked:
"Pitots (pronounced PEE-toes) are small cylinders that sit outside the body of the plane to calculate airspeed. The cost of a pitot probe is not high — about $3,500 each for the model on Flight 447, which disappears in the $200 million cost of a plane — but their importance would be hard to overstate. Without them, a plane’s flight computer has no way to determine speed, and the automatic pilot shuts down."
It sounds like that is exactly what happened?
Edit: Nevermind. Maybe I misinterpreted what you were saying. Sounded like you were saying they were lucky for getting their article out before it was determined that their focus on the cause of the crash was wrong.