Last month it was the passenger who failed to own up to smoking in the toilets who brought the wrath of a stern pilot down on a planeload of holidaymakers. But yesterday the question was not "Who was smoking in the toilets?" but "Who wrote this note?"
An apparent hijack crisis at Moscow's Domodiedovo airport involving 97 passengers and crew ended peacefully if not amiably yesterday afternoon. But the 70 male passengers on board the East Line flight were then questioned in an attempt to find who had written the offending note.
The drama began when a flight attendant found a note on the cabin floor during a flight from Irkutsk in Siberia. It demanded the equivalent of $100,000 (£71,400) in roubles and threatened to blow up the jetliner.
But by late yesterday, long after the 97 passengers had stepped to safety, security agents were still looking for the hijackers. They began to suspect these people might not even have been aboard the Tupolev TU-154 at all.
The luggage and the plane were thoroughly searched and no bomb was found.
After the plane had been several hours on the ground, and the hijackers had not identified themselves, the women and children were taken off the plane. Later, security agents detained all disembarking adult males who had been on the plane to check their handwriting and find out whether it resembled that of the note, which a panic-stricken flight attendant had rushed to the flight deck as the plane was cruising westwards from Siberia.
The alarm summoned heavily-armed squads of expert marksmen from Moscow's elite Apha antiterrorist unit, armoured vehicles and ambulances to Moscow's airport for domestic flights at Domodiedovo south of the capital.
"A flight attendant found a note on the floor during the flight demanding that 621,000 roubles be left in the plane's toilets after landing. . . She gave it to the pilot," the spokesman said.
The note had also demanded another plane to fly the supposed hijackers to a third, unspecified country. The money was prepared in five bags, the plane landed and was guided to a remote spot in a corner of the airfield, marksmen took up position, then. . .
Nothing happened.
The flight captain found himself doing all the "negotiating" with security forces lying outside in waiting, until eventually passengers and crew descended sweating, shaking, but safe.
"There was no assault, nor any violence," said Mr Maxim Tarasenko, security spokesman at Domodiedovo, adding: "The terrorist or terrorists, the authors of the note, have not been identified."
Authorities had not ruled out the possibility that the incident was a bad joke or that the note had been left before the plane took off.
Last month a British pilot, Capt Brian Bliss, refused to allow 70 people aboard a flight from Stansted to Milan to disembark after smoke alarms showed that somebody had been smoking in the aircraft's toilets.
Plane and bus hijacking attempts have increased in Russia in recent years, often ending in bloody shoot-outs. At the end of December a Swedish diplomat was taken hostage outside his embassy in Moscow and his kidnapper later died in a hail of police bullets.