BOSTON (AP) – Authorities staged an elaborate anti-terrorism drill Saturday at Logan International Airport, responding to a simulated hijacking reminiscent of the December 2001 plot by Richard Reid to detonate a shoe bomb aboard a trans-Atlantic flight.

Operating on the premise that gun-toting terrorists were trying to hijack a United Airlines plane carrying 169 passengers from Paris to Chicago, two F-15 Eagle fighter jets intercepted the airliner over the Atlantic Ocean and forced it to land at Logan.

On the ground, FBI and State Police tactical teams stormed the plane, freed the volunteer “hostages” and arrested two “terrorists” after negotiators failed to yield a peaceful end to the fictional hijacking.

“Operation Atlas,” which cost roughly $700,000 and brought together about 50 federal, state and local agencies, was billed as the first training drill involving a real airborne intercept of a commercial airliner.

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said the exercise, paid for by a federal Homeland Security grant, was money “well-spent.”

“It’s about practice,” said the mayor, whose office helped coordinate the drill. “I would rather have a glitch today than (during) an actual terrorist attack.”

Many of the same emergency workers from Saturday’s drill also responded to the 2001 attempted hijacking of American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami.

That flight was diverted to Boston and landed safely at Logan after Reid, a self-proclaimed member of the al-Qaida terrorist network, tried to ignite explosives in his shoe. Reid, now serving a life sentence, was subdued before the flight landed and then arrested.

Massport aviation director Tom Kinton said some of the lessons learned from Reid’s attempted shoebombing were incorporated into Saturday’s drill.

For instance, police carefully searched all of the passengers and crew members after they were freed from the plane – a precaution that Kinton said wasn’t as thoroughly observed following Reid’s arrest.

“You don’t want to assume that that one person is the only (terrorist),” he said of Reid. “You have to do a thorough check of all the passengers to ensure that nothing else was going on.”

Boston’s drill wasn’t the largest of its kind. In April, New Jersey and Connecticut teamed up for the five-day “TOPOFF 3” drill, which included a simulated bioterror and chemical weapons attacks resulting in 6,508 “deaths” and the arrests of five mock terrorists in a raid.

The participants in Saturday’s drill planned to meet later in the day to evaluate their response to the mock hijacking and search for ways to improve.

“Finding out what’s wrong is what we want to do,” said Carlo Boccia, director of Menino’s Office of Homeland Security.

Boccia said there were no “glaring errors” and fewer glitches than he had anticipated.

“Things went just as we hoped they would go,” added Amy Corbett, regional administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Logan officials had warned neighboring residents, pilots, airlines and passengers in terminals that Saturday’s display was only a drill. The exercise didn’t cause any delays at Logan, according to a Massport spokesman.