Hmmm.
ATC is a service for the operation of the airport and aircraft. The PIC complied with his company policy, advised in a timely manner to ATC what his constraints were, and ATC acted to punish them for complying with their requirements. The wording by LH was not the best of grammar but I would share his sentiment. ATC action was not to give a service to the aircraft to comply with their operational requirements. This used to be a professional program with ATC and the flight crew aiming for the same outcome, in this case, the ATC acted to pressure the crew into breaching their SOPs in order to appease ATCs workload. Their "can't have this conversation" speaks loudly. SFO used to be a pretty reasonable place to operate in and out of, didn't seem to be on this day.
If ATC has an issue with a crew advising them of an operational requirement, we really need to rethink what we are trying to do here. It matters not at all if the night was a bombers moon and VFR, the operator has requirements that are in their OpSpec, that are approved by..... the FAA, so this is a lunacy that a C series OpSpec is being objected to by ATC in their actions. SFO is a mess for ATC flow control, but the crews questions on expected hold is what the FAA expects a crew to do, and has done since Avianca did some gardening in the backyard of John McEnroe's parents shack..
That was shabby, and the PIC did what he is required to do, colourful language notwithstanding.
Was more like what is expected from ATC out of JFK than SFO, but for JFK, the same stressors exist, really bad airspace design, and excessive traffic for the ATC to deal with.
That’s a really good set of observations. We (another large airline from the Europe area) can do visual approaches at night but with some pretty heavy restrictions. We are also not allowed to do circling approaches in the USA according to our OP-Spec, although we can do them anywhere else in the World.
I remember once making a visit to the tower in K??? with my manuals to explain why we couldn’t do 200kts to the marker on a 3.5deg NPA to a performance limiting runway in a MLW 777-300. Having laid out my case ATC were very understanding...