And of course it’s not remotely possible that he got away because no one was watching the airplanes and the Russians made this up from whole cloth to make themselves look brilliant.
Turning off the transponder is not rocket science. Hijackers do it. Air traffic is tracked almost exclusively by transponder. In the U.S. and Canada small private aircraft are not required to be so equipped if they stay out of controlled air space. The introduction of ADS-B allows anyone with a receiver to track all ADS-B equipped aircraft within their field of view. ADS-B is an extension of normal ATCRBS (”at-crabs”: Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System) which transmits once a second without interrogation.
Military aircraft normally transmit beacon replies (ATCRBS) and ADS-B when they are operating in civilian airspace. Obviously not when in combat or training for combat.
Military radar use “skin track” to track non-cooperating aircraft, and civilian air traffic control still employ skin track, but skin tracks are mostly ignored by ATC, especially outside North America.
the Russians made this up from whole cloth to make themselves look brilliant.
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Of course. Putin is a well-known genius - just look at how he has begun to resurrect the Soviet Union, masterfully handled: the cost of the rubble fell from 81 to the dollar to 104, meat wave assaults for 758,000 casualties for incremental gains over 4 years in a war he began, destruction of 90% of the old Soviet military equipment - leaving troops almost no armor.
Brilliance beyond compare! Pure genius! Masterful!