I think the FAA leadership is ultimately in the wrong for allowing their area of responsibility to deteriorate to the point where a controller and a pilot were put in this situation.
They have a controller shortage that they are not doing enough to fix, and they have a troublesome airport with limited capacity to accommodate traffic, that they are being too bureaucratic about fixing. The controllers at SFO have used a number of tools to address the handicap, but the FAA recently put a lid on that by forbidding side-by-side IFR/VFR approaches while also failing to authorize custom precision landing procedures like SOIA.
The request for ILS is entirely reasonable in this context, and the decision to hold the flight out of the sequence is also reasonable in the context, but to hold the flight with no updates for half an hour is not reasonable and to require it to divert is not reasonable either. The FAA should be held responsible for planning things better than this.
They have a controller shortage that they are not doing enough to fix, and they have a troublesome airport with limited capacity to accommodate traffic, that they are being too bureaucratic about fixing. The controllers at SFO have used a number of tools to address the handicap, but the FAA recently put a lid on that by forbidding side-by-side IFR/VFR approaches while also failing to authorize custom precision landing procedures like SOIA.
The request for ILS is entirely reasonable in this context, and the decision to hold the flight out of the sequence is also reasonable in the context, but to hold the flight with no updates for half an hour is not reasonable and to require it to divert is not reasonable either. The FAA should be held responsible for planning things better than this.