"this result was so unexpected and bizarre that the pair concluded they must have made a calculation error and decided not to report the details of the incident to the airline" I'm no pilot but my gut reaction to reading this is <insert facepalm emoji>.
In his (also excellent) article about the AF447 crash, the same author explains that the stall warning on the Airbus 330 went off when airspeed dropped below 60kt, because such a speed was considered impossible in flight.
This is believed to have been a contributing factor to the confusion of the pilot flying: the more he pitched up, the more he stalled (as would be expected)... yet it made the warning go off.
It's only natural to shy away from outlier values. I think the reason is that we want to place any input into a system, and outlier values don't fit, so we simply ignore them.
It takes a special mindset to focus on outliers or even to accept them.
