NEW YORK The weather is bad at your intended destination and your plane is diverted. Soon you find yourself on the ground closer to home than to the plane's original destination. Can you get off and make your way from there?

Be careful how you ask. When Hazel O'Leary asked to get off a United Express plane in Richmond, Virginia, one thunderstorm-stricken day in July, she ended up explaining herself to the airport police and FBI agents.

O'Leary's case may have gone a little further than most, but this kind of conflict is not rare, experts in air travel say. Airlines are generally not happy about frustrated passengers trying to get off at unplanned stops, particularly if they, like O'Leary, have checked baggage. And in the nervous, post-Sept. 11 mood, any emphatic request may be seen as a threat.

David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association, an advocacy group, said that while he is reluctant to defend airlines, his sympathies were not always with such passengers, since letting some deplane often created more delays for others.

O'Leary, once the secretary of the U.S. Energy Department who is now president of Fisk University in Nashville, was trying to get from Nashville to South Carolina, via Dulles. When her plane was diverted to Richmond because of weather, she knew she would not make her connection, so she got on her cellphone, found a flight from Richmond and tried to get off.

The airline let another passenger off, but not O'Leary. At 7:30 p.m., about three and a half hours after the plane was due at Dulles, the police at Richmond International Airport went to the plane on a complaint about a disorderly passenger.

The police report has conflicting versions of what happened. What is not in dispute is that O'Leary's request was turned down by a flight attendant and that she then appealed to the captain, Kathryn Coad. The police report said, "The captain explained to her they were not at a gate and she would have to wait." It is not clear if this description is correct; the airline said it had already allowed another passenger to get off.

"Captain Coad said the lady started yelling so she proceeded back to the cockpit," the report said. A flight attendant decided that O'Leary was trying to enter the cockpit (which O'Leary denied), blocked her and called the police. After questioning her until 11 p.m., the police evidently decided she was not a threat, and she was allowed to go on her way. She was not charged with a crime.

Possibly adding to O'Leary's frustration is that this was a United Express flight, and since 1999 she has been a director of United Airlines, something she alluded to in her police statement.

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