A drunken Delta passenger will spend six months in federal prison for turning a trip from Tel Aviv to JFK Airport into a 12-hour flight from hell because the crew cut off his booze.
Shachar Bivas, 44, of Long Island, started a mid-air melee with a flight attendant last year, punching him, pushing him and ripping his uniform, according to court filings.
On Thursday, Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Dora Irizarry sentenced him to six months behind bars and a $9,500 fine. His has to surrender by Aug. 2.
Bivas took Delta Airlines Flight 235 from Tel Aviv to JFK at 11:55 p.m. May 31. Just after takeoff, he asked for, and received, a vodka drink, according to court filings.
The crew member who served him noticed he was visibly drunk and told the flight crew to cut him off — and Bivas didn’t take it well, prosecutors said.
US DOJ
Photos of the injuries caused by Bivas as shown in court documents. (US DOJ)
He got up, approached a second flight attendant and asked for another drink, stating that his father had recently died and he was upset about it, according to the feds.
The flight attendant offered him a coffee, instead, and asked him to return to his seat, which he did.
But Bivas was undeterred. He got up again and asked the crew member for a drink and a cigarette, then slammed his fist into a refrigerator next to the flight attendant’s head, according to the feds.
As the plane flew over Europe, Bivas got up again while the flight attendant he’d been bothering was chatting with another passenger, the feds said.
He shoved the passenger aside and demanded a drink, then grabbed the flight attendant, pushing him, punching him and ripping his uniform, according to filings. Another attendant intervened and restrained Bivas.
US DOJ
Photos of the ripped uniform worn by a flight attendant that was shoved by Bivas mid-flight. (US DOJ)
The assaulted attendant then ran to the front of the plane and asked the captains to make an emergency landing, but they declined — instead pulling one of the pilots from his duties monitoring air traffic communications to handle the ruckus.
One of plane’s captains, Michael Glenister, described the distraction in a letter to the judge: “I would equate this situation to driving a car in an unfamiliar area at night with kids screaming in the backseat, versus doing the same with someone else in the passenger seat taking care of the kids and reading street signs for you.”
The plane’s flight attendants had to keep Bivas in the back of the plane for the rest of the trip, and though he apologized, he also broke a mirror in the plane’s bathroom, according to court filings.
“The defendant injured (the flight attendant) Flight and prevented him from performing his flight attendant duties, such as ensuring the safety of the 275 plus passengers traveling together in an enclosed space, from which there was no escape, more than 30,000 feet above the earth,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David Berman wrote in an April 3 sentencing memo.
Bivas was indicted in August and pleaded guilty in December to interference with a flight attendant. Federal guidelines suggested a zero-to-six month prison term, though the charge against him carries a maximum 20-year sentence. Irizarry went with the high end of the guideline suggestion.
In an interview with the Daily News on Sunday, Bivas railed against the sentence, calling it excessive and accusing the judge, without offering any proof, of being “antisemitic.”
“I don’t think that it was fair at all. I think that she was being antisemitic,” he said. “She was attacking me from the beginning. She didn’t listen to anything I said … The fact that she knew that I was Jewish might affect her decision. Anything that I said she didn’t accept.”
He said that Irizarry shut down his explanation that he was in a state of emotional distress because his father had just died of lung cancer and he was returning home from Israel after being present for his dad’s final hours.
“She wouldn’t even listen. She wouldn’t accept that. She started to say, ‘No, don’t use that,’” he said.
“Not that I’m saying I was right. I was wrong. But it was an emotional burst because of what happened to my father and there was alcohol involved,” Bivas told The News.
At one point, Bivas said, he asked to be switched from group psychiatric counseling with “a group of people that committed serious crimes and are about to go to prison” to one-on-one counseling prior to sentencing.
When asked why he believed the judge discriminated against him, Bivas said, “She kind of declared that I think myself more than other people … She’s telling me that I’m better than other people … In the previous court appearance that we had, she called me condescending.”
