I think the real problem is a gap between the expectations of aircraft tracking and the reality of aircraft tracking. Even with all the doodads turned on, air control systems more or less rely on the pilots arriving in the correct air space, at the right time, following their flight path, and the responding to the controllers radio message confirming that they are where they're supposed to be. If 9/11 taught us nothing it's that even in the US, tracking is proactive, not reactive. We find planes when they are where they're supposed to be, but more or less fail utterly at noticing something there that isn't supposed to be. Cause that's not what traffic control does.
As to military tracking, that's problematic as well. They have to know to look for something. Doubly so when it's an aircraft that is the correct size and shape to match the hundreds of other commercial aircraft within their tracking area on any given day. I think most people would be shocked to realize how poor our own military is at detecting an aircraft flying towards our shores and actually doing anything about it. And we actually have the capability to scramble fighters to go take a look on the occasion when we do notice a track on our screens doesn't actually match a flightpath for a known commercial flight.
Because of this, I think we're failing to establish any sort of baseline for "unusual tracks on our military screens" and placing far too much weight on all the random seeming sightings and data out there. The wrong way to do this is to go to all the military folks in the area and have them look over their logs to see if they can spot something that might be this plane crossing their areas on the day in question. The correct way to do this is to have each of those military sites pick a random day say a week ago, and examine their data on a normal day when a plane doesn't disappear and see how many unexplained tracks they have. Then you can make sense of the data we see on that day in question.
Same deal with the satellite stuff. It's quite possible that every single piece of data we're operating on is being misinterpreted because we haven't first established the normal amount of clutter, noise, and inaccuracy that occurs in these systems every day. For all we know, none of those military tracks showing the plane (what they think is the plane) are accurate and it actually flew off in some completely random direction and crashed. Dunno, it just seems like a lot of chickens absent heads not really working this step by step but flying off based on whatever "new data" they just found.
____________________________
King Nobby wrote:
More words please
