ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A drunk man sparked a hijack alert on a Turkish Airlines plane on Wednesday after passing a note to the pilot saying he had a bomb, a top airline official said.

Passengers after landing safely in St Petersburg

Turkish Airlines Chief Executive Temel Kotil told broadcaster NTV: "We learned that the passenger was drunk".

Passengers on the aircraft, which had taken off from the Turkish resort of Antalya bound for St Petersburg in Russia, disarmed the man, a spokeswoman for Turkey's main airport operator TAV said. No bomb or weapon was found on him.

The plane, carrying 164 passengers - mostly Russian tourists - and 7 crew, landed safely in St Petersburg, Turkish media said.

"The passenger sent a note to the captain which read 'take me inside (the flight cabin) or I will explode the bomb I have,'" Kotil told state-run Anatolian news agency.

The pilot refused to open the door and the assailant was overpowered by passengers, he said.

Hijackings are common in Turkey, where a number of radical groups ranging from Kurdish separatists to far-left militants operate, and several incidents in the past two years have ended without casualties.

Late last year two men hijacked a Turkish airliner heading for Istanbul from nothern Cyprus, but gave themselves up and released their hostages after forcing the plane to land in southern Turkey.

(Reporting by Ercan Ersoy and Daren Butler, editing by Richard Balmforth)