This same airport had a crash during visual approach during the day no? Seems wild to give huge delays to anyone not willing to do a visual approach, it's clearly pressuring pilots to accept the visual approach when they may not be comfortable with it.
And I do believe the atc has to provide accurate (to their knowledge) accounts of what the delay is, to ensure flights can divert before being out of fuel. Even saying 'we don't know how long the delay is' is at least information. It seems incredibly clear from the logs the controller was being an ass as well. No need to go 0-100 part when asked about how long the delay is, pilots literally need that information.
SF politics come into play here as well. There’s been talk of expanding the runways so visual approaches wouldn’t be needed for decades now, but Aaron Peskin seems to have made it his personal issue to kill it at every opportunity.
Have there been any serious proposals or discussion in the last two decades? SFO’s current master plan estimates a growth of 50% more passengers and aircraft operations before maxing the current capacity.
Not since the original proposal ~20 years ago, Peskin has made comments since reiterating that he wouldn't let it happen. We may not be at capacity but SFO has a pretty terrible on time percentage, and traffic slows massively when there's bad weather.
"The NTSB determined the probable cause was the Air Canada flight crew's confusion of the runway with the parallel taxiway, with contributing causes including the crew's failure to use the instrument landing system (ILS), as well as pilot fatigue. A retired pilot stated the runway confusion that almost happened "probably came close to the greatest aviation disaster in history"[2][3][4][5] as five airplanes and potentially over 1,000 passengers were at imminent risk of a disaster greater than the Tenerife airport disaster."
And I do believe the atc has to provide accurate (to their knowledge) accounts of what the delay is, to ensure flights can divert before being out of fuel. Even saying 'we don't know how long the delay is' is at least information. It seems incredibly clear from the logs the controller was being an ass as well. No need to go 0-100 part when asked about how long the delay is, pilots literally need that information.