Some 200 passengers aboard a midnight flight to London returned to Kennedy early yesterday after a flight attendant found a threatening note saying a bomb was on board.
The threat turned out to be a hoax.
Virgin Atlantic Flight 10 had been in the air for about an hour when the pilot announced there was a security threat and that he was turning the plane around.
Flight attendants asked passengers to stand one at a time while the staff made a seat-to-seat inspection for possible explosive devices.
The plane landed without incident at 1:30 a.m., said a spokesman for the federal Transportation Security Administration.
Passengers were ordered to disembark and were then re-screened.
Port Authority police bomb-sniffing dogs thoroughly searched the aircraft but did not uncover anything suspicious.
Passenger Gilly Tatalow, of Oxfordshire, England, said that when the pilot made the announcement, “I was quite worried. But then I thought there’s nothing you can do. People were amazingly calm.”
“They said that the plane was threatened, they didn’t tell us what kind of threat it was,” said Army reservist Sheldon Hunt, 40, of Plainfield, N.J., who was on vacation from active duty in Iraq.
“I was at ease, most of the passengers were at ease. It was not the time to panic, it was the time to cooperate. Everyone on the flight behaved extremely professionally,” he said.
The passengers were put up in nearby hotels and were scheduled to leave on a flight last night. Virgin Atlantic said in a statement, “As Virgin expected, the threat is now viewed as a hoax.”
The airline said it was cooperating with authorities in the investigation.