Aisle Filibuster Grounds Dornan : Airline: The Garden Grove GOP congressman is expelled from a United flight after a dispute with the chief flight attendant. He’s recuperating from surgery and didn’t want his seat-back upright.

WASHINGTON —  On the floor of the House of Representatives, Orange County firebrand Robert K. Dornan is known for his hot-blooded oratory.

But a heated exchange between the Garden Grove Republican and a flight attendant aboard a United Airlines jetliner in Los Angeles about a month ago may have outstripped even the most memorable of Capitol Hill colloquies, according to passengers who witnessed it.

The upshot was that the seven-term congressman, who was recuperating from hip replacement surgery, was thrown off a Chicago-bound plane for failing to raise his seat-back to its full, upright position. He was left to calm down on a bench outside Los Angeles International Airport, without a ride home to Orange County or a plane to Washington.

“I was on the bench with my crutches,” Dornan recalled, “like a little waif,” until his wife picked him up an hour later.

According to Dornan’s office, United Airlines officials have called to apologize about the incident and have promised to set up a meeting between Dornan and United Chief Executive Stephen Wolf to clear the air. But the conservative congressman’s feathers remain ruffled.

“I feel like I’ve been abused,” he said in an interview Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for United said the airline is not commenting on the incident.

The way Dornan tells the story, the supervising flight attendant on the overbooked United Flight 116 was in an unpleasant mood the night of April 30 when she walked past Dornan’s 11th-row seat shortly before takeoff. According to Dornan and another witness, the flight attendant had already gotten into an argument with one passenger who found his assigned seat filled when he boarded the flight.

As the plane pulled away from the gate, the flight attendant told Dornan to raise his partly reclined seat. Dornan told her that he was recovering from hip surgery, that his doctor had ordered him to avoid sitting bolt upright and that at least two other flight attendants had given him permission to leave the seat partly reclined.

That argument was not persuasive, recalled Kelly Karpp, 39, a Michigan businessman who was seated next to Dornan and who corroborated the congressman’s account.

The supervising flight attendant consulted the captain, then returned and said to Dornan, Karpp said, in no uncertain language: “Sir, you will have to put your seat back in the upright position, or we will have to put you off the plane.”

“That got me uptight,” Dornan said, “so I said, being sarcastic, ‘Wait a minute, we may just have to do that.’ ”

That was the only time he raised his voice, Dornan said. Then he offered to negotiate.

The way Karpp remembers it, Dornan “was starting to get smoked. . . . So he says, ‘Look, put me off the plane.’ He really didn’t think they were going to do it.”

The unidentified chief flight attendant announced over the public address system that the plane was returning to the gate to put off a passenger who had failed to comply with FAA regulations.

“I thought, ‘Am I dreaming this?’ ” Dornan said. So he borrowed an extra pillow, moved forward in his seat, popped the seat-back fully upright, turned to the flight attendant and said, “Stop your loud mouth and let’s go.”

But it was too late for compromise. “She stood for one deadly second, staring at me with that same smirk,” Dornan recalled, “and said, ‘I want you off my airplane.’ ”

Another passenger, seated two rows back and across the plane, recalled that the tired travelers, angered by the delay caused by the return to the gate, applauded as Dornan hobbled off the airliner on his crutches.

“The first thing I heard was a stewardess talking in a very loud voice to a passenger. She was saying, ‘But I am the supervisor,’ ” said Frank Eisenberg Jr., a retired biochemist from Bethesda, Md.

“The discussion got more and more heated. . . . And when (the passenger) turned around, I recognized him as Dornan. I had seen him on television many times. . . . He was talking like he was in the well of the House.”

In the five weeks since the incident, Dornan said, flight attendants on nine other flights, including several on United, have allowed him to recline his seat slightly during takeoffs and landings to ease pressure on his hip.

“I collect stewardesses’ names now every time they let me keep my seat down,” he said.

In the end, Dornan said, the incident sensitized him to the problems of the handicapped--so much so that he may seek to draft an amendment to the Americans With Disabilities Act, passed last year, to ensure that airlines take proper care of those who are not completely able to take care of themselves.

“I’m going to go back and look at the disabilities bill,” Dornan said, “and write some aircraft language.”