Bit of a barney with ATC today, what would you have done?

[Genghis the Engineer]

'Wot Beagle said.

This is a VFR flight - so 3nm+ visibility (and in Spain, usually much better than that). Grenada point W is 9nm from the airport, and about, what, 2,0000ft above the airport elevation?

This is not a sudden avoid on a mid air collision we're talking about here, it's an event well ahead of time. At, say, 90kn or less climb speed, that's 6 minutes or longer and allowing 1000ft vertical separation, the aeroplane needs a climb rate of 500fpm or better. The pilot can see at-least 2 minutes ahead of themselves, probably rather further.

I can absolutely see why, seeing anything below 500fpm RoC the pilot needs to ask for an alternative routing. But there's all the time in the world to declare an inability to follow the previously accepted clearance, request an alternative routing, and accept it. There's nothing I'm reading here which justifies unilaterally changing routing without previously agreeing this with ATC.

Plus, at risk of stating the obvious, 15 degrees left of a straight track to point W from LEGR, takes him towards the holding pattern around GDA VOR and/or the outbound track for the ILS from GDA (there's only an ILS on 09, followed presumably by a circling approach, according to the Spanish AIP), which is probably where the chap "practicing ILSs" was, and will have degraded that pilot's IFR separation minima.

And maintaining safe separation of this erratic VFR flight from the IFR flight, is probably exactly why our man was handed over to the radar controller, who'll already be controlling and/or monitoring anything on the ILS or hold. That's not them being difficult, that's them ensuring safety.

G