(October 2011) Air France 447 went down in the mid-Atlantic in 2009 because all three of its pitot tubes iced up.
Well, not exactly. It wasn’t the loss of functioning pitot tubes that doomed the airplane; it was what the A330’s autopilot, and human pilots, did next. The autopilot — but it would be more proper to say computer, since fly-by-wire airplanes are controlled by decision-making systems far more complicated than the word autopilot suggests — the computer, seeing that it had lost reliable airspeed information, immediately turned over control of the airplane to its human minders.
