Doctor now regrets pleading guilty over incident on airplane

On the evening of June 26, as Southwest Flight 1226 neared the end of its 31/2 hour journey from St. Louis to Las Vegas, Dr. Sivaprasad Madduri, a 64-year-old urologist from Poplar Bluff, Mo., left his seat in the sixth row and began heading toward the front lavatory.
The captain was using the lavatory at the time, and a flight attendant told Madduri to return to his seat. When Madduri saw the captain leave the lavatory, he got up again. It is against FAA regulations to approach the cockpit when the cockpit is not secure. Madduri claims he did not know this. A spokeswoman for Southwest Airlines claims that two flight attendants explained the regulation to the doctor. At any rate, some pushing ensued. "She pushed me back into my seat," said Madduri. Yes, but that was only after he tried to force his way past her, the spokeswoman for Southwest said.
When the plane landed, two police officers came on board and escorted Madduri off the plane. He was turned over to the FBI. He was taken out of the airport in handcuffs, then taken to a detention center.
"The officers took mugshots and fingerprints, and I was ushered into a large jail cell," the slight physician later wrote in a letter he sent this newspaper and Southwest Airlines. "I looked around and there were already 43 inmates. All of them were young, abusive and using language I never heard of. There were small fold-down benches along the wall. Having no place even to sit, I spent half of my night standing."
In the morning, he was taken to federal court. He said a court-appointed attorney told him he could plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and pay a fine of $2,500. Or else he could plead not guilty and expect a protracted and costly legal fight that would almost certainly require multiple trips to Las Vegas. He pleaded guilty and eventually made his way to the meeting that had brought him to Las Vegas in the first place — the annual convention of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin.
Was he a victim of racial profiling? Or over-zealous flight attendants? Or post-911 paranoia? Or were the problems mostly of his own doing? Or could it be a little bit of all of the above?
"I can tell you this, these types of cases are taken very seriously by the U.S. Attorney's office, particularly when you have somebody who is trying to force his way to the front of the airplane when the pilot is out of the cockpit and the cockpit door might have been open," said Ray Gattinella, the assistant U.S. Attorney who handled the case.
Well, yes, but if you believe the Southwest version of events, this is a 64-year-old guy who was unable to overpower a flight attendant. Should this really have been a federal case? Then again, rules are rules, and this particular regulation was put in for a reason.
"I didn't know about this law," Madduri told me.
Brandy King, the spokeswoman for Southwest Airlines, said flight attendants were required to explain the cockpit-door and front-galley regulations as part of the preflight announcements.
Yes, but many of us zone out during those announcements.
King said the flight attendant tried to explain the regulation to Madduri during the incident. The criminal complaint, filed by the FBI, makes mention of a second flight attendant who allegedly tried to explain the regulation to Madduri after he returned to his seat after his first effort to get to the lavatory. The complaint says the first flight attendant again tried to explain the regulation to Madduri when he made his second attempt. The complaint states that Madduri said, "I'm not listening to you."
Did the FBI talk to any of the other passengers? That would settle the argument. Sadly, the FBI office in Las Vegas did not return repeated phone calls.
20/07/08 Bill McClellan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, United States

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Categories: Foreign Jul 2008, Safety Jul 2008