Hi Lonnie,
I was the first approach controller you spoke to at Philadelphia and I'd like to just go through my side of the story and my thought process when handling the situation and hopefully clear up any questions!
I received you and you were our first GA flight into Philly of the event so I checked with the final controller to make sure everyone was okay with a Visual approach to Runway 26. He said yes and I told you that you could expect that approach.
You then said something along the lines of "Just letting you know, after the Visual, we'd like to request a touch and go and then IFR practice approaches at Philly."
You were leaving my airspace and about to enter Final's, so I replied something along the lines of, "I can't guarantee a touch and go nor practice approaches to the quantity of arriving and departing traffic, but if you land at Philly you can ask a controller there and they could try coordinate trying to get you in for a practice approach or you could ask for clearance to either a satellite or a different airport."
You then asked "So am I being denied practice approaches during an event?"
I replied, "For right now, I can't guarantee that you'd be allowed practice approaches because of the level of traffic, but there might be another time where we can fit you in."
By that time Final had picked up your track and I verbally handed you off to him.
That's the story from my point of view, but I could be remembering some parts wrong and correct me if that's the case, but I think I got the gist of it.
I'll just run through each part and explain why it was difficult or impossible to happen from a controller's point of view.
In terms of the practice approaches, the final controllers were overloaded as is, and it was already hard finding spots back into the flow for jets that had gone around. We had many aircraft divert and others had to hold at Lancaster VOR or DRIFT until there was a hole in the flow where a feeder approach could take them. For these reasons, it was unlikely that we could have found space for you anywhere but maybe runway 26. We easily could have taken you at any of the satellite fields like KPNE, KTTN, or KILG, or something in another tracon like KMDT or KABE, but the only problem would've been if you had landed, you probably would've had to wait a good amount of time to depart again.
There was no problem with asking for practice approaches, and we're always thankful for the traffic, but on very rare occasions like events we can't guarantee practice approach services just because of the volume of traffic.
I think the main problem in this encounter was that everything was very rushed, because you were already very close to the airport so there wasn't much time to discuss your options, and because of the nature of the event, the final controller would not have had time to talk thru everything. I think your best option if you'd like to try something like this in the future would be to take off like you did from a nearby airport and then ask center or a approach controller what the options are because we can see where the traffic is and what is possible at that time.
Let me know if you have any questions, and thanks so much for flying!
August Eriksson