You're correct about general proximity, but I've never heard of anyone losing the AoA and pitot and/or static at the same time. They're all very different devices. I can think of three pitot or static related crashes right off the top of my head that had good AoA's.

Had they turned on the the flight path vector display (the 'bird') they could have viewed the difference between where they were pointed and where they were going - ie, AoA. Anyone sharp enough to figure that out for themselves in the middle of the descent would not have stalled it in the first place, though.

All in all, it's just incredibly sad.

Wrong, wrong, right. There is no 'stick shaker' in the Airbus. It has an aural stall warning ( 'STALL, STALL' ). Correct on the shutoff if the airplane is way too slow to be flying.

A pilot who thinks that AoA and airspeed are sourced by different sensors isn't silly, he's correct. Airspeed requires the pitot and static system. AoA requires the AoA vane. Different sensors. Plenty of incidents where one was hosed but not the other. Don't know of any where both were lost.

And just how is the computer supposed to know which input to use? It doesn't, so it sums inputs from the two sticks, and announces loudly 'dual input.' The pilot taking over is expected to press and hold the autopilot disconnect switch while taking over to tell the flight control computers to ignore the other stick. Nothing 'POS' about that part of the aircraft.

For an accurate description of the control inputs google AF447-f-cp090601e3.en.pdf .

To paraphrase Churchill... Never in the history of aviation blogging has so much crap been said to so many by one who new so little.

Vacuum system on an A330? The only vacuum system on an A330 is the toilet.

The static system worked fine. They knew their altitude all the way to impact.

The pitot was heated. It was heated from the moment the first engine was started, automatically. The pitot design was unable to cope with the amount of supercooled water thrown at it. The subsequent design had problems, too. The current pitots by Goodrich work fine.

Nobody 'put their head in the sand.' They made a fundamental error at the start and then were deeply confused as to what their problem really was.

Seeing you expound an A330 crash based on your light aircraft experience is like watching a model rocketeer tell us what went wrong with Challenger based on his experience with cardboard tubes with fins.

The accident report is painful to read because it was so avoidable. Your post made me as angry as the accident made me sad because you don't know squat about jet aviation yet feel free to tell us exactly what went wrong.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-participates-in-21stcentury-cashless-econ,8969/