OK. I've now read it.
I’ve been involved in aviation as military aircrew, FAA ATC (since 1982), attorney, and historian for 30-odd years, and see this report as clearly driven by the desire to achieve a particular outcome. A fundamental lack of understanding with regard to the use (or non-use) by military aircraft of MTRs, MARSA, breaking up military fast jet flights into individual components, “potential conflicts in same airspace” involving military and civil aircraft, etc makes it a painful read. Of particular interest is the unfounded assumption that an aircraft flying a racetrack pattern in the area was AWACS and therefore, HAD to have seen something. Of course, the authors were either completely unaware that the returns they observed in the racetrack patter were, in fact, along an AR and, especially in that the local MOA was active, were very likely to have been tankers, or they chose to ignore that fact. What’s more, aircraft undergoing flight test often fly endless racetracks.
I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have much depth in estimating degrees of arc using the “little finger at arm’s length” method (as figures so prominently in this "study,") but I do know something of aviation, and it seems to me that these guys got their hands on some FAA data and got more excited than they should have. A quick Google search for the name of the engineer who signed-off on this thing comes up with a Larry King interview on CNN where the excitement (sensationalist) factor shines. That very same search turns up the gentleman’s free-lance association with the TWA 800 conspiracy as well, so there you go…
Bottom line: RADAR is imperfect. Targets drop. Transponders crap out. Data blocks jump. Ground clutter can be blinding. Cars, trucks and birds confound the best laid plans, and things can vary based on where the MTI gate is set. Yadda Yadda Yadda. These boys have yet to convince me that they’ve got the chops to interpret ATC data. Hell, if the FAA and NTSB (and counterparts elsewhere) can get data reduction wrong, it seems senseless to take the word of rank amateurs' analysis on something like this...
Oh. And their punctuation was poor as well.
Sorry about the rushed (and poorly constructed) rant. Burned too much time reading the danged thing and now I’ve got real stuff to do!
Just my two cents.
Dave
PS A warning to the authors of this tome: don’t bother PM-ing me. I’ll just drag it out into the thread anyway.