Scare Grounds Plane at Dulles

FBI agents and Dulles International Airport police grounded, surrounded and searched a Northwest Airlines jetliner bound for Amsterdam on Tuesday night after a report of a possible hijacking that turned out to be a mistake, authorities said.

No one was injured, but the situation at the Northern Virginia airport outside of Washington was so tense that the plane’s pilots opened an escape hatch in the cockpit and climbed down a rope to the tarmac, Northwest officials said, leaving 215 passengers and 11 crew members on board for nearly two hours.

FBI agents searched the DC-10 and a bomb-sniffing dog checked luggage before passengers were allowed back into the terminal, some passengers said.

The incident began about 6:30 p.m. Eastern time when a crew member mistakenly declared an emergency, Northwest spokesman Doug Killian said. “This was a false alarm,” he said.

The FBI, Northwest and airport police all declined to say what the crew member said or what prompted the crew member to say it.

But Killian said the cockpit was in contact with the airline’s operations center in Minnesota, which advised the pilots to leave the plane. He would not elaborate on the communication or say whether the Federal Aviation Administration was involved in the decision. FAA officials could not be reached Tuesday night.

“This would be quite unusual,” Killian said. “It is not a policy.”

The incident comes a week after four planes--including one that took off from Dulles--crashed after being hijacked by terrorists. More than 5,000 people are feared dead after the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

Instructors at flight schools where the terrorists trained have said that some of the pilots were capable of flying the planes once they were airborne but were not proficient at taking off or landing. But federal agents and airline officials declined to say whether that had anything to do with the pilots’ leaving the plane.

FBI spokesman Chris Murray said his agency did not order or advise the pilots to leave. “We don’t tell air crews how to conduct themselves,” Murray said.

Northwest Flight 36 was canceled for the night, and passengers were taken to a nearby hotel. No other flights were affected, airport officials said. Murray said no one was arrested or taken into custody.

Gayle Stanton-Vitale, of Reston, Va., one of the passengers on the plane, said she boarded the plane shortly before 5:30 p.m. and settled in for a nap. She awoke, she said, to find the plane surrounded by police cars. Crew members told passengers that the flight was delayed because of airline traffic, she said, but they suspected that it was something else.

Some passengers made calls on cell phones, Stanton-Vitale said, but she prayed.

“We knew something was going on, but we didn’t know what,” she said.

Meanwhile, in the largely deserted terminal, Stanton-Vitale’s husband, Tom, waited anxiously for his wife--with flowers. A friend had called after hearing a news report about the plane, and he rushed to Dulles. He ran to a ticket counter, where workers assured him that the incident was a false alarm.

“I had 25 minutes of panic,” he said. “My heart was racing. I just wanted to make sure she was OK.”