Does ATC know your flight plan? My recollection from the Channel 9 days was that pilots requested whatever landing clearance they wanted when they pinged the appropriate ATC, but I’m neither a pilot nor ATC, so don’t know if there were processes I wasn’t seeing.
ATC knows the flight plan, but in the US (as opposed to Europe) the last few steps to the ground are generally not filed as part of the flight plan, but are negotiated when closer to landing. There are pros and cons of this, of course.
