U.S. sky marshals on a flight from Pittsburgh to Reagan National Airport suddenly ordered a plane to land at Dulles International Airport yesterday, after a passenger got up and started walking toward the cockpit, authorities said.
The passenger, Raho N. Ortiz, 33, refused to follow a new federal rule requiring passengers to remain seated in the last half-hour of an approach to National, said Chris Murray, an FBI spokesman.
About 15 minutes before the plane was to land at National, Ortiz got out of his seat and started walking briskly toward the front of the plane, where a restroom and cockpit are, said David Castelveter, a spokesman for Arlington-based US Airways.
As Ortiz neared the cockpit, a sky marshal in plainclothes seated near the front yelled, 'Stop!' said passenger Mike Cannon, of Arlington.

Flight attendants had announced the ban on getting up during the last half-hour of the flight, passengers said.
After the sky marshals had Ortiz handcuffed on the ground, the marshals ordered the other 106 passengers to put their hands behind their heads and later on the seats in front of them for the rest of the trip, several passengers said. Some said they briefly thought that the plane was being hijacked and panicked.
The plane, a nearly full Airbus A319, remained at Dulles rather than following the usual pattern of being allowed to continue on to National after a diversion, said Tom Sullivan, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which runs both airports.
Ortiz, a lawyer, works for the Environmental Protection Agency, his mother said last night. When the plane landed at Dulles shortly after 5 p.m., the FBI arrested him on a charge of interfering with a flight crew. By 8:30 p.m., the FBI had dropped the federal charge and released Ortiz, Murray said.
However, the Airports Authority police issued a summons ordering Ortiz to appear in court in Loudoun County to answer a charge of misdemeanor drug possession in connection with the alleged possession of marijuana, according to an Airports Authority spokesman.
It was the first time that U.S. sky marshals diverted a US Airways flight, Castelveter said.
Federal Aviation Administration officials refuse to discuss the sky marshal program in detail, but sources say marshals are aboard all flights into and out of National.
Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman, could not confirm whether yesterday's was the first flight diverted by sky marshals. Since flights resumed service to National after Sept. 11, some flights bound for that airport have been rerouted to Dulles. But in most cases, the cause was improper procedures by the pilot, Brown said.
Flight 969 took off from Pittsburgh International Airport at 4:19 p.m. and was due at National at 5:20 p.m. Ortiz left his seat shortly after 5 p.m.
Authorities said he lives in Northeast Washington, but his mother said he lives in San Francisco, where he works for the EPA. Telephone calls to an EPA spokesman went unanswered last night.
Agnes Ortiz said her son is not a terrorist. "No way, he's Navajo -- Native American -- from this country. We were here before all you people," she said.
Staff writers Michael Laris and Emily Wax and researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.