Payless

The airline said it had started the replacement program April 27 after laboratory test suggested, “the new probe could represent a valuable improvement to reduce the incidence of high –altitude air speed discrepancy resulting from pitot probe icing.”
But some airline safety experts said that while wayward sensors might have played a part in the crash that killed the 228 aboard, It’s more likely that a cascading series of events, any one of which the pilots would have been able to deal with if it had occurred alone, combined to cause the destruction of the aircraft.
Investigators said pilots received “inconsistent” airspeed data in crucial moments leading up to the crash, and safety experts and analysts have focused on the pitot tubes. But icing on the pilot tubes is not new and they have heater elements in them to mitigate the risk of icing.  Most likely the aircraft hit the turbulence and related weather relatively early in its flight, so it was still heavy with fuel and flying near “the top of its height ceiling”. 
Another version is that the aircraft might have had some electrical problems. Once the pilots realized they were in trouble though, experts said, they would have taken control of the aircraft from the autopilot.