Most of the technology used in aircraft is locked in to the state of the art of 1932. Jet engine technology is locked into about 1952. The laws and international agreements controlling this are political entities carved in granite. Do not expect too much from newer electronic devices. “Safety Of Flight” requirements do not change at all. The pitot tube is a piece of metal, probably stainless steel, that looks a lot like a piece of electrical conduit. The electric heater inside keeps it at a couple of hundred degrees. De-icing equipment is normally on wing leading edges and maybe around jet engine intakes. If the possible icing conditions were as bad as has been suggested, maybe the fuselage and tail surfaces where there is no deicing built up thick ice. That could make the airframe unflyable very quickly. Ice may have formed on wings due to strange turbulence from flying at difficult angles of attack thereby destroying the lift properties of the airfoils. Center of Gravity of an airplane is critical to super-critical. Tail heavy planes stall and try to go through impossible gyrations. Try it with a little paper airplane. Make one that flies adequately; then add some weight (paperclips?) to the tail and watch what it does. Aerodynamic forces could have taken the Airbus apart at altitude and the pieces found could have fluttered down to the sea. The big pieces are missing and may well have been shattered into small fragments on impact that quickly sank. There are cases on record of airplane crashes where the plane was observed to dive into the ocean and vanish almost instantly. Damage to the structure allows air to escape very quickly and aircraft as least as big as twin-piston-engined business planes have been later found mostly in one chunk. Big thunderstorms and squall lines have been the bane of all aviation since there were airplanes. Some things never really change. Hopefully the unmanned deep submersible subs will find the Air France wreckage and be able to take meaningful pictures.
