Passenger: Airline kept us in dark with regard to delay

Thomas Pfrang began to wonder what was going on when his flight didn't take off as scheduled.

Instead, there was a mysterious delay on the tarmac that led to the plane being put in a remote part of the airport.

What he didn't know - but quickly learned - was that the plane was being detained because an anonymous caller had threatened that the jetliner was to be hijacked.

Pfrang, 19, was one of the 163 passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 24 who were detained, searched and questioned at San Francisco International Airport Thursday following the threat.

Friday, he recalled his experience at Kennedy Airport's Terminal 8 while waiting for his luggage at the carousel. Pfrang had been traveling to New York from the Philippines via San Francisco.

Authorities swarmed the plane and passengers weren't allowed to get up in groups to go to the bathroom and couldn't retrieve belongings from the overhead compartment, said Pfrang, a Cooper Union civil engineer major originally from Roslyn but now living in the East Village.

"They didn't tell us anything," he said. "They just told us to sit down."

Word about the threat quickly spread as passengers tweeted about the experience and read about it on the Internet and their phones, he said.

The threat was reported by a hotel clerk in Alameda, Calif., a city across San Francisco Bay from the airport. The clerk told police dispatchers that her business had received an anonymous phone call "making a threat specifically about Flight 24."

The Boeing 767 was grounded for several hours and the flight was eventually canceled while authorities swept the aircraft. No threat was found, officials said.

After Pfrang and the other passengers were allowed to continue on their travels, he went to rest at a hotel.

"It was a long day," he said.

Friday, he boarded the same flight home.