This is, unfortunately, the pompous attitude of a small proportion of the ATCO fraternity.......or perhaps, to give the benefit of the doubt, he just chose his words badly.
Hmmm, and some of the Brit controllers thought *I* was humorless...
3rdtimelucky,
I'm in the U.S., but don't think the problems and considerations are much different here than there.
As you surmise, there's no obvious reason for a controller to
work at putting your turboprop behind a jet once the jet has slowed to 250 kts. But there may be some less than obvious ones.
Let's take a case where you're five miles in front of a turbojet on an extended downwind or base to the final, doing 230 kts at 4000'. If the following jet was, for whatever reason, handed off to me high and fast, I may make a poor situation worse by slowing the jet to follow you because many new generation jets can not slow and descend at the same time with any "enthusiasm". I could always vector the jet for descent, but that may not be possible because of the limits of procedure, my airspace or traffic. Then I'm left with a less satisfactory solution of slowing you, because
you can, and letting the jet descend at best rate and high speed.
Another situation arises at my airport where we run downwinds to parallel ILS finals. You're going to rwy 35L let's say, but the Jet's going to 35R, yet you're both arriving from the NE. A situation may arise where it's preferable to hurry the jet's arrival, because of gaps in the final for that runway, yet I know you're going to have to extend to 20 mile final for your runway anyway to fit in line. There again, it may make sense to slow you now, and let the jet run on ahead.
Also, as others have said, it may be newer controllers who are simply unaware what your aircraft is truly capable of. When I got into ATC decades ago, the running joke was you could always tell a new controller because they'd try to "beat that Frontier Convair" (580) to the airport with a jet. Something increasingly
difficult to do as they got within 25 miles of the airport, and nigh impossible within 15 miles. However, the flip side of that coin is that an
experienced controller knows that a turboprop can also slow in a heartbeat. I used to fly MU-2s myself. So some may use it as a "crutch" I suppose, but not as much as pilots think.
Hope that helps!
