Aug. 10: An airline in Vietnam has been fined for an in-flight bikini dance show that featured beauty queens strutting their stuff in the aircraft’s aisle.

VietJet Air, a low-cost carrier of Vietnam, says it staged the event to help celebrate its August 3 inaugural flight between Ho Chi Minh City and the tourist centre of Nha Trang, according to Australia’s News.com.au.

The Associated Press offers a colourful description, writing: “A YouTube video shows young women in open vests and red bikini tops gyrating in the aisle as gleeful male passengers snap photographs on the VietJet Air flight.”

News.com.au says the “Hawaiian-themed” dance lasted about three minutes and featured five women who all are contestants in a local beauty pageant. The video shows passengers taking video of the dance. Later, dancers come down the aisle to mingle with passengers at their seats.

“It was the first flight to a beach town, so we came up with the idea of getting a number of girls in bikinis to dance and make passengers happy to improve our customer service,” a VietJet Air official was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail of London.

The show did not go over well with Vietnamese regulators, however. Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam fined the airline 20 million Vietnamese dong — or about $960. “They should have registered [with us] before they held the show,” Nguyen Trong Thang, chief inspector of the agency, said. “This is the first time an airline has organised a bikini dance aboard a flight in Vietnam.”