that's a bad situation.. glad it worked out safely.

saw the story air, it was on wednesday. He repeated a couple of times that he was declaring an emergency and that he needed to land on 16C or whatever it is regardless of the wind. He stated they had a fuel emergency , but none the less it was an emergency.

I believe these are the actual recodings:
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2893887

i would have told that controller that i was going to stick the nose of my 757 up his A$$........

old quote i heard from a DAL Captain : "Am I up here because your'e down there or is it the other way around?"

That is a good. I'll have to remember that one.

"We need to declare an emergency" were his exact words. Im amazed that on a forum for airline pilots we can't even all agree the controller screwed up. The captain declared an emergency and got dicked around. That should NEVER happen. Can we all agree on that?

Absolutely. It seems pretty simple to me!!

Like the man said... When a pilot declares an emergency the red sea parts.

"We "need" to declare an emergency" and "We "are" declaring and emergency" are two different things. Did the Captain declare and emergency? I really don't know. Don't get me wrong, ATC should have dropped everything, but the verbage was not strong enough. You're right, SikPilot, this should never happen again.
fbh

ERAUdude,

There is "minimum fuel" and "emergency fuel", and both are significantly different.

MEM_ATC