Sometimes I find it absolutely hilarious how little they care about the various general aviation flights that like to go on sight-seeing tours in Manhattan. You may say this is true for all major commercial airports, but I've flown into Bradley and Logan several times and the controllers would regularly give me priority over some regional jets coming in behind me.

My favorite moment came yesterday when we were circling around LGA trying to find a 1500 foot runway in Flushing. It barely counted an airport. It only had one parking spot (ICAO FLU) I guess we started to drift into JFK airspace at one point because when we tuned in New York Approach and asked for some directions to land in Flushing, the controller responded "sure, as soon as you get the hell away from 13L." We climbed quickly and got the hell out of there before they could yell at us any more and found the runway ourselves

In addition, feel free to post some stories about any other hard-ass controllers you've had to deal with, New York or not.

 

You were wanting to land at Flushing?

 

i may be wrong but hasn't flushing airport been closed for some time?....anyways as far as NY app control goes, I've had good experience and bad. However, the bad experiences usually were because the guy i was flying with had trouble holding an assigned heading lol. I did try and avoid the bravo as much as possible tho, last time i headed over to the Hudson corridor for sight seeing.

 

I like getting the clearance in LGA because the guy there is so incredibly anal about having it read back exactly how he read it. So if he says "Direct ETX, Direct, XXX, Direct CMH" You can't say "Direct ETX, XXX, CMH". He wants it word for word. I'll make him repeat a few times just snickering at how anal he is.

 

No, it's still open for some very minor daily operations. We had to get special permission to land. It's mostly weeds, though.