When Airspeed Goes Blind

A frozen airspeed sensor has now been implicated in the fatal Texas plane crash — the same class of failure that downed Air France Flight 447 in 2009, killing 228 people. Pitot-static ice-over can render a crew effectively blind to how fast they're flying, triggering the kind of erratic, unrecoverable maneuver that breaks an aircraft apart. The FAA mandates pitot heat systems, but in general aviation, enforcement is thinner — and the accident record shows the gap keeps claiming lives.