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 Aug. 3 inaugural flight between Ho Chi Minh City and the tourist center of Nha Trang, according to Australia's News.com.au.



The Associated Press offers a colorful 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 didn't go over well with Vietnamese regulators, however. Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) 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, is quoted as saying by news24 of Australia. "This is the first time an airline has organized a bikini dance aboard a flight in Vietnam."



He added to AFP that the show "violated local aviation regulations" by putting together "an unapproved show on a flight."



However, despite the CAAV chief's comments, Business Traveller magazine writes "it's not the first time the carrier has organized a dance event on one of its flights."



Indeed, Business Traveller posts an video (dated January 2012) of VietJet Air crew doing a loosely choreographed dance performance on another flight. That, the magazine writes, suggests "the scantily-clad nature of this latest event has proved the biggest issue for Vietnamese authorities."



As for VietJet Air, the carrier launched service just this past December, becoming one of the first private airlines to begin flying in Vietnam.

Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam (CAAV) fined the airline 20 million Vietnamese dong – or about $960.