Flight safety and well done Airbus.

 Your nice shiny Malaysia airlines Airbus A 330 takes off from Brisbane and climbs to 11.000 feet, you and 228 other people enjoy the comfort and view.  What none of you know is the crew have no airspeed indications, and aircraft need to keep above a certain speed to avoid dropping like a brick.

 To make matters worse is they took off like this, it didn't happen in mid air, they actually took off with no airspeed showing .

 The reason is very simple, Brisbane has a wasp problem, no not stinging people (well yes they probably do) but the mud wasp likes to nest in tubes and small holes, the planes pitot tubes for example, this is a heated (in flight) tube sticking out the front of the plane, linked to a sort of barometer, the plane works out the speed from the difference between the air coming in the tube and the static air pressure outside (from a hole somewhere else) obviously if the tube is blocked the system fails to work properly.

 If Mr wasp bungs up the hole you have no speed or the wrong speed.  This has caused fatal crashes in the past, as has icing of the tube if the crew forget to turn the heating on.  Airports have a cure for wasps ect, a sock like cover with a big red tassle on it is put over the tube to keep stuff out... like wasps.  The trick here is to take the sock off before you take off, it's a bitch to reach after!

 So at Brisbane the sock was fitted and left on.  Before takeoff the captain, engineer and dispatch coordinator all do a walk around to look for things just like this, none of them noticed the sock and tassle designed to be easy to see and obvious.  

Before takeoff the the aircraft’s primary instrument displays showed red speed flags in place of airspeed indications  due to the lack of data, now as the crew use the airspeed dial as part of takeoff, theres things called V1 and V2 speed which are important they couldn't have missed the red flags, they still didn't abort the takeoff but went anyway.

 Luckly for the 229 people onboard Mr Airbus had thought of things like this happening (or he'd met the crew before) Either way this particular aircraft was fitted with a system called BUSS, back up speed scale, this helps to keep the aircraft in a safe speed range in the event of the primary system failing.  They were lucky, the next plane doing the same might not have this system!

 The flight landed safely back at Brisbane.   I think it's safe to say this captain will check properly next time he takes off....  I hope.....