Beyond the Pitot Static System

Failures or disagreements in the pitot-static system may deprive the flight crew of a reliableairspeed reference precisely when workload increases. Commercial aircraft already carryinstruments that can indicate attitude, altitude, vertical speed, trajectory, and accelerationwithout direct dependence on pitot probes. These quantities, however, are not equivalent toairspeed and are not always integrated into one explicit and operationally simple degradedindication. This article proposes the evaluation of an independent monitoring layercombining inertial data, altitude and vertical speed, GNSS, angle of attack, aircraftconfiguration, thrust, and performance models. Its output could be a synthetic airspeedrange, an energy trend, and an associated confidence level. Air France flight AF447 isdiscussed as a case study rather than as the sole basis for the proposal. The centralhypothesis is that useful redundancy against common-cause failures should preserveinformation through different physical principles without replacing the pitot-static system,certified procedures, or crew judgment