I know it's unlikely to be the case here, but it would be quite amusing to learn this was someone like Jeff Bezos one-upping the likes of Bill Gates and John Carmack with their fast cars. [1] [2]
It is only a matter of time before this actually becomes plausible, if not already. The next logical step for extreme hooning and evading police is doing it in the air, and evading the USAF. If you're not pushing it further than those who came before you, it's kindof irrelevant in this context.
Crossed my mind; some Silicon Valley/Seattle-based billionaire testing a skunkworks project. Or maybe Sebastian Thrun flying high-performance version of Kitty Hawk for next-gen Uber flying taxis ;-)
Or even something far less extraordinary like billionaires betting they can fly their jet from point A to point B in controlled airspace without transponders in complete radio silence without getting caught.
The whole disappearing from radar thing in this story is the only reason anyone suspects something extraordinary or military.
Everything else about it says it's somewhat benign. The observed speeds are fairly common, they describe something behaving like a normal jet, and it's traveling in airspace the military has no reason to mess with and every reason to avoid for safety reasons.
I know of a number of psychopaths who would do this kind of thing if they had the means.
Yeah I've heard stories of some people doing crazy, dangerous, illegal things in small planes and just turning their transponders off.
I was a passenger in a C182 once where the transponder antenna fell off midflight. It was very educational how much trouble ATC had seeing us. Even after telling them exactly where we were, flying the heading they gave us to present the broadside of the a/c to the radar antenna, they basically said "there's something that might be you there, but I can't really tell."
A big jet at FL370 should show up on primary, but I can see it depending on a bunch of factors.
It is only a matter of time before this actually becomes plausible, if not already. The next logical step for extreme hooning and evading police is doing it in the air, and evading the USAF. If you're not pushing it further than those who came before you, it's kindof irrelevant in this context.
[1] https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/bill-gates-famous-mug...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/4kfs42/john_ca...