ORAC - Yes, I accept that as far as it goes, but doesn't the "friendly " assumption cease to be valid (or least shouldnt a seed of doubt be sown) at the point that the IFF is switched off and and voice transmissions cease. I'm assuming some liaison between civilian and military ATC here, maybe that's a rash assumption.
Very rash.
Malaysian ATC had chopped the flight to CHM and had an acknowledgement, then the aircraft left cover, with the SSR disappearing as it, apparently left radar cover eastbound - a totally normal transfer at the FIR boundary, why would they call anyone?
As a scheduled flight the flight plan would have been a repetitive stored flight plan in the database at CHM, but cancelled/delayed flights are a day to day occurrence so, unless Malaysian ATC called they'd they wouldn't know there was a problem, and it wouldn't be triggered and loaded at the boundary gate as the appropriate flight/SSR didn't appear, so why would they take any action?
Malaysian ADGE would have identified the track as friendly after take-off and continuously tracked it, so it was never an unknown, so the system wouldn't provide an alert.
This was carefully planned. The only point where it might have raised an alert was if the ADGE radar operator thought the behaviour of the flight was suspicious in turning around and called a superior. But without the flight plan would he suspect anything? It could have been a test flight, a medical turn back with an emergency on board, a military flight leaving the airways structure at a planned point en-route to an operating area, a naves. Gut feeling is that he'd have been quite happy as long as the blip had an A or F on it and wouldn't have done a thing or had a suspicion.
Won't stop him and his bosses getting it in the neck though; bound to be a BOI and sh*t flows downwards....