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I guess that means the PIC not having a “transatlantic bladder” is the reason.....At least to the know-nothing media mavens.

Don’t know how AF conducts its business but most lines conducting long overwater flights have at least three FULLY RATED/QUALIFIED PILOTS, (sorry for the shout, but emphasis is needed), aboard with two at the controls at all times.
Sorry, I don’t belive the presence/absence of the “Captain” in the left seat made any difference.

Flight at high altitudes is a “knife-edge proposition” in that you’re flying in what is known as the “throat”. Its a region where the aircraft’s critical mach number and its stall speed for its weight/altitude converge. Mostly this is not a problem because the aircraft, (Airbus in this instance), has redundant pressure, temperature, airspeed sensing systems feeding information to multiple flight computers that act as an “autopilot”. This system does a far better job of flying the aircraft than a human can “hand fly” it as it has far better reaction times - plus accesss to more control surfaces - than the pilot.

But this flight was crossing what I know as the “intertropical convergence zone” where great thunderstorms - with their characteristic vertical developments - can build. I posit, ‘What happens when a failure of the sensing instruments, or the computer software dedicated to reacting to this data fails’ ?

Airbus conceived a radical “globular” concept of flight management based upon computer control of all aspects of flight management. But not without accident. Its most spectacular was crashing its flagship at a public air demonstration when it wouldn’t respond - as later revealed due to software errors - to pilot inputs. Is this accident yet another example of a similar “software glitch” ?

A “stalled out” heavy in a spin in instrument conditons at high altitude isn’t something practiced or anticipated IMO. Due to fuel weight/distibution, combined with faulty air data inhibiting control responses, its possible the pilots were faced with an uncontrolable airplane. >PS

The current system is the best system developed so far.

Measuring Air Speed from within an aircraft is a pretty complicated process. The pressure generated within the probes by the air, and the pressure differential on the static ports works extremely well in tens of thousands of flights every day across the globe. Usually the wings ice over long before the pitot fails due to icing.

While we do not know that the probes iced over, that is a vailid assumption based on the ACARS maintenance messages received that at least one failed to provide accurate speed information.

Icing in a probe without a mechanical failure of the heating element is very hard to prove, because if it ices, then the ice will usually melt before the probe can be examined on the ground.

As to the reliability

Probes are heated.
There where three separate independent probe/static port systems on the aircraft.
Several other A330 aircraft have exprienced what is apparently the same situation as AF447 - and all have come through without major problems. True none were in as severe weather as AF447.
Formation of ice sufficient to foul the probe at that altitude was through to be impossible, but new science has found that assumption to be in error.
Airbus and several airlines had determined the Thales pitot probes to potentially have an issue. Air France had already ordered a fleet wide replacement of that model - concentrating on their A320 aircraft first (the A340 aircraft also had the same probes).
Pilots are trained early in their career how to fly without reliable air speed indications, and the A330 has some very specific, and proven successful, methods to deal with such a problem.

Something else happened with AF447 that went beyond simple icing of the probes and loss of air speed data.