It's enough to drive ya nuts! LOL
The momentary plane-disappearing act is off-putting, but after awhile I found I kinda expected it and just automatically anticipated where the dot would suddenly reappear as...a plane. Usually. Sometimes I fail to reaquire it and curse the CoD gods!
I've found the plane-sighting reports work fairly well, as long as you keep track of your current location (usually pretty easy on the current Channel map). As soon as I see a report come up on a custom Server Window (since I can never understand what the helll the controller is saying), I pull up the ingame map, check the grid ref of the enemy a/c and its direction of travel, and roughly calculate the bearing and alt I need to take to intercept. Sometimes it's a no joy if the e/a changes its course and/or alt in the meantime, other times I experience an "aha" moment when a tiny dot(s) appear roughly where you predict.
Good luck and hope to run into you online!
Snapper