Originally Posted by
1wife2airlines
A quick glance at the chart shows about a 20 mile arc and a 20 mile final. Why would they want to get down and close to the terrain and get bounced around when not necessary if they had any vertical navigation awareness? The FMC might also have given them some vertical navigation info if time permitted finger fking it.
They're used to getting slam dunked in places like that, so they're spring-loaded to get down sooner rather than later, especially on a complicated approach.
Worth noting that a SLC 900 probably had a very, very senior CA (who grew doing a VOR approaches into mountain holes in a metro), so there's likely some cultural misunderstanding about how those at-or-above clearances work.