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 note was inside a plastic bag that held a passenger’s headset, said FBI spokesman Jim Margolin.
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.
Bomb-sniffing dogs thoroughly searched the aircraft but did not uncover anything suspicious.
“I was at ease, most of the passengers were at ease,” said Army reservist Sheldon Hunt, 40, of Plainfield, N.J., who was on vacation from active duty in Iraq. “Everyone on the flight behaved extremely professionally.”