It’s not the ATCs job to get the plane down at the primary airport, on the pilot’s preferred schedule, in accordance with the airline’s policy of using ILS for landing at SFO at night. Any two would be a satisfactory outcome, and it sounds like the pilot could in fact have picked any two (well, it sounds like Lufthansa policy prohibited just getting in the VFR queue). Nobody was ever in danger and the worst case scenario was that the plane lands at Oakland, which was always a possibility from the moment they took off. If landing at Oakland is such a disaster Lufthansa could have canceled the flight once it became clear that they were running 3 hours late, had missed their originally planned slot, and would be landing at night.
jojobas|2 years ago