The incident began Thursday morning when a man with an unidentified accent called the front desk clerk at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Alameda and said he was going to hijack American Airlines Flight No. 24, hotel General Manager Dhruv Patel said.

"He did specifically mention a flight number, which happened to be an active flight," Patel said.

Alameda police Lt. Bill Scott said police received a report at 9:09 a.m. from a business on the east side of town reporting that a clerk had just gotten a call from a stranger who had made a threat against an airliner.

Police contacted federal authorities after investigating the report and determining the threat was specific enough to warrant a response, Scott said.

Patel said the threatening call had come from outside the hotel, but the caller didn't say where he was or why he was calling the Hampton Inn.

The call was "jumbled" and filled with profanity, and the clerk said the man was hard to understand, according to Patel. He said the phone call lasted less than a minute.

"It all happened very, very quickly," he said. “From what he could gather from the 45 second conversation -- a lot of it was very hard to pick up -- but from what he did gather was ‘I'm going to hijack Flight 24 on American Airlines.’”

Flight 24 was initially scheduled to depart at 7:40 a.m. Thursday for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York but was delayed for unrelated reasons until 9:15 a.m., passengers said.

Police got the call about the hijacking threat just before the flight was scheduled to take off and notified the FBI, prompting authorities to hold the plane on the tarmac for several hours.

The flight was carrying 163 passengers and 11 crew members, American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Frances Fagan said.

The passengers were removed from the plane and were taken to a terminal for screening, San Francisco police Sgt. Michael Rodriguez said.

Local authorities conducted a sweep of the aircraft.

"They're going over every inch of that plane," FBI spokesman Joe Schadler said this afternoon.

Schadler said two people, a man and a woman, were led off the plane separately and questioned, but that no one was arrested.

Passenger Andrew Latham, 27, of England, was sitting two rows ahead of the pair who were removed.

He said San Francisco police boarded the plane and spoke briefly with the man, asking him his name and where his bags were. They then led the man off the plane in handcuffs, Latham said.

Latham and his wife, 25-year-old Emma Bullen, were returning home from their honeymoon, which included stops in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.

After the threat was received this morning, the Transportation Security Administration requested that the plane be moved to a remote location as a precaution.

"We were miles from everywhere," Latham said.

He said the mood on the plane was tense but calm throughout the wait. One person at a time was allowed to use the restroom, and no one was permitted to access the overhead bins, he said.

Hours later, passengers were removed from the plane six at a time, Latham said. San Francisco police checked each passenger with a wand and inspected the carry-on luggage.

Everyone was then taken back to the terminal on a bus, he said.

San Francisco police have released little information about this morning's events, but authorities determined the threat was not credible, police spokeswoman Lt. Lyn Tomioka said.

The caller had not been identified Thursday evening, but Tomioka said the identity was still being investigated because it's a federal crime to make hoax terrorist threats.

Passengers on Flight 24 were being rebooked on other flights.