Posted 8/05/2005 05:56:00 PM by Douglas

Southwest flight given the terrorist two-step in Houston:

All 136 passengers aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 21 have been released after an investigation at Hobby Airport this afternoon of a bomb threat on the plane, which was bound for Corpus Christi.

The plane was isolated at the airport after a written bomb threat was found on board by a passenger on the Dallas-to-Corpus Christi flight.

Southwest Flight 21, carrying 136 passengers and five crew members, reported the discovery of the threat about 12:30 p.m., when the craft was about five miles out from Hobby, said Houston Airport Systems spokesman Roger Smith.

An FBI spokesman told CNN that the note was not a terrorist threat and termed the incident as insignificant.

Let's put this in perspective, shall we? All terrorist's threats are insignificant, except when they're not. Then they're a pretty damn big deal. I don't know if we'll ever find out what happened on Flight 21, because the way Southwest herds passengers in and out of their planes, a smartass' note that says "there's a bomb on board" could sit in the seat-back pouch for several days before someone gets bored enough to flip through the current issue of SkyMall, as is clear with the following:

It was unclear whether the note was written on that flight or had been left there by a passenger on a previous flight, Tribble said.

The bigger question is why it took over an hour to get the passengers off the plane after it landed:

"When we landed, they told us there was a bomb on the plane," Leger said. "It was like a bubblegum wrapper where somebody wrote there was bomb on the plane. What kind of disturbed me was, they thought there was a bomb on the plane and they left us sitting there for about an hour. Nobody seemed to have a procedure in place for when something like this happens. So that kind of worried me quite a bit."

Ok, I get "worried a bit" when they run out of peanuts. If I'm sitting on the tarmac in my 737 sarcophagus with 135 of my new closet friends, I'm going to get a bit more than worried. I'm going to make a bee line to the emergency exit aisle like Carnie Wilson to an all you can eat ribs buffet after her stomach staple fell out.

But this isn't the first time a random note left on a plane led to such drastic diversions.

About 40 minutes into the flight, a note saying, "Bomb, bomb, bomb ... meet the parents," was found on a crumpled napkin with a wad of chewing gum in it.

The pilot was informed of the note and the plane returned to the airport, where it was met by the bomb squad from the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

After a sweep of the plane and questioning, the 176 passengers were returned to the terminal at about 11 p.m.

The note could be a reference to the 2000 movie "Meet the Parents," which starred Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro.

In the film, Stiller's character rejects a flight attendant's efforts to check his bag.

Kinda makes the "Hi, Jack" joke look like nothing.