I voted for this guy partly because he was rumored to be brilliant and thoughtful. So far he seems to be just your average Democratic president and a newbie to boot.

You say: "Well and good. But what if the computers and pilots have no idea that the pitot tubes are partially blocked with ice and giving falsely slow readings, causing the computers to increase thrust to dangerous levels? Should this situation not have been anticipated? I can think of another situation in which ice and excessive speed caused a great loss of life in the Atlantic. That was also due to hubris."

I'm having trouble understanding all of what you're saying or implying. But the situation in which pitot tubes might get iced and deliver false readings was very much anticipated - there was a whole series of pre-programmed system reconfigurations triggered by the "airspeed disagreement" detected between the multiple (redundant) pitot sensors, specific warnings for the pilots, and corrective sequence consisting of "memory items" (procedures to be memorized by the pilots) as well as checklists for the pilots designed to further debug and correct the problem. This set of correctives was applied, successfully, in a number of reported pitot icing incidents in recent years (incidents which Patrick alludes to in his article). Hubris of the Titanic variety is not the problem here. On the other hand, a set of conditions that was, until recently, not known to cause pitot icing may very well be the problem.

Another point: "dangerous thrust levels" are entirely relative. Try to think like a computer, or a pilot: if you see indications that your aircraft is slowing down to the point of stall, what do you do? Increase thrust, before your plane stalls and crashes. If you see indications that your aircraft is overspeeding, what do you do? Decrease thrust, before your plane suffers structural failure or high-speed stall. In either case, you are at the mercy of what your sensors tell you. You have no way to magically divine what your airspeed actually is - if you did, you wouldn't bother having the doggone sensors in the first place. It's been said many times, but computers can't be smarter than the people who create and program them.

It is a great stretch to go from Patrick's article, which as he says is very speculative in any case, to "serious design problems" with the A330.

The flight control computers can't do much to compensate for bad data from sensors, and neither can pilots, for that matter. If, indeed, the speed sensors on AF447 began to ice up, causing indicated (rather than actual) speed to go down, it is plausible that the autopilot increased engine thrust and therefore aircraft speed. It is equally plausible that the pilots themselves could have done so after the autopilot disengaged. But an important point is that there is a specific procedure, expected to be memorized by all A330 pilots, to be used when airspeed sensors fail. That procedure calls for manually setting engine thrust to a specific value. So the particular "computer generated" overspeed scenario laid out by Patrick, in order to be true, would imply pilot error as well.

While the pictures of the vertical stabilizer certainly brought back memories of AA587, it is far more speculative of Patrick to imply the composite V.S. as potentially causal than it is to speculate on pitot icing. Pictures show that essentially the entire composite V.S. is intact, while it appears that parts of the metal structure to which it is attached fractured. And it has to be said that aircraft accidents involving loss of control at altitude, for whatever underlying reason, often result in one or more aerodynamic surfaces (wings, horizontal and vertical stabilizers) breaking off the aircraft due to overspeed or excessive aerodynamic force - and these breakages result regardless of the material from which the surface is constructed. Finally, it is unlikely that detachment of the vertical stabilizer was a primary cause, in that we see no ACARS messages you would expect to be associated with such a breakage.

If there truly were "serious design problems" with the A330, it is unlikely that it would have racked up such an uneventful safety record to this point. Like almost all modern commercial aircraft accidents, this one is likely due to a combination of improbable events. Increasingly, it appears that if we don't find the black boxes, we'll end up with a range possible scenarios, probably involving a combination of degraded flight data (airspeed and maybe attitude) combining with strong turbulence and/or updraft/downdraft to sufficiently confuse the pilots that a major loss of control occurred (e.g. stall or spin), with the aircraft then breaking up at altitude due to overspeed in a dive, or to excessive forces on the structure from attempted recovery by the pilots.

One thing Patrick doesn't say: one function the flight control computers perform is limiting the deflection of control surfaces at high aircraft speeds, to prevent excessive loads on the aircraft structure. Without accurate airspeed data, the computers remove these limits (for obvious reasons). This makes it easier for the pilots to overload the aircraft structure, and this may be a factor in this case.