The Hanoi People’s Court yesterday sentenced a young woman to 15 months of probation for joking that there might be a bomb in her luggage while she was onboard a plane last year.

>> Athlete fined $950 over bomb threat>> Passenger fined for Hai Phong bomb hoax>> False bomb threat delays flight in Hai Phong>> Former VN Airlines official jailed for bomb hoax>> Bomb threat prankster to be fined $725 Ho Thi Thanh Tuyen, 25 and from Da Lat, was charged with “disrupting airway traffic,” the court said. In July 2011, shortly after taking her seat on a flight home from Hanoi, Tuyen reportedly held onto her baggage despite a flight attendant Bui Tuan Anh’s request that she store it. When the plane prepared to take off, Tuyen again refused, saying, “What would you think if there were a bomb in the bag and it exploded when I put it in the hold?” When Anh asked Tuyen to repeat herself, she said she was only joking. But the flight attendant reported the remarks to chief pilot Ajay Trayan, who then halted the flight for safety reasons. All 171 passengers returned to the terminal to wait three hours for security checks. After those yielded no explosives, officials handed Tuyen over to investigators. Vietnam Airlines said the delay forced it to suspend three flights, losing more than VND304 million (US$14,600). In court, Tuyen repeated her defense that she was only joking. She told the court her family was poor and she made just VND2 million ($96) a month. But a Vietnam Airlines representative demanded she pay damages of VND100 million, which the court later approved. The airline has seen a number of false bomb threats in recent years. Nguyen Bang Viet, a former employee, received a similar sentence and fine in 2011, after he told a flight attendant, via text message, about a fake bomb that caused Vietnam Airlines to cancel a flight from Hanoi to Siem Reap. In separate cases, two others also were punished last year on related charges, including a French passenger boarding a plane at Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat Airport.