(Doug Rinks) writes:

A couple things.. I think out of fairness to the controller the only
thing which you can say is that he was not busy on your freqency. It
is possible that he was busy on another freqency which you were unable
to hear, or he could have been busy coordinating your clearance, or
maybe even coordinating departures, so you would not create a problem
for them. You just never know without seeing the other side.

The thing to remember here is that you were VFR, and asked to pickup
your IFR clearance in the air. That by definition gives you less
priority in the system compared to other already IFR aircraft. Maybe
the lesson here is not to pickup your clearance in a terminal area,
but rather do it from the center prior to entering the TRACON's
airspace. I can assure you that the controller wasn't blaming the
delay on saturation for no reason.. there was obviously saturation
either in his sector, or in a sector which was ahead, and/or below
you.

I once tried to get a clearance from PVD approach on a
popup from Newport on a CAVU night. There wasn't an
airplane in the sky except us and we were told there'd
be a 45 minute delay. And PVD isn't that busy at the
worst of times...