ANCHORAGE (AP) – A woman convicted along with her twin sister of disrupting an international flight that had to be diverted to Anchorage was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation.
Crystal Mikula, 22, of Buckley, Mich., also was fined $500 by a federal judge after pleading guilty to simple assault on board a flight from San Francisco to Shanghai on April 19.
Her identical twin, Cynthia Mikula, also of Buckley, was sentenced a day earlier to five years probation and ordered to pay more than $86,000 in restitution.
The restitution represents United Airlines’ costs for the diversion.
Prosecutors said the women were headed to a modeling competition when they got drunk, argued, yelled profane language at each other and smoked in the airliner restroom.
When the flight crew tried to intervene, Cynthia Mikula struck a female flight attendant in the face and hit a male flight attendant and the captain, according to prosecutors.
Her sister jumped on the back of another flight attendant and choked him in an attempt to prevent her sister from being restrained with plastic handcuffs.
One of the plane’s 233 passengers videotaped the disturbance.
The pilot diverted the plane to Anchorage. The passengers and 22 crew members spent the night and resumed the trip a day later. United had to accommodate the passengers during the delay, compensate them for the inconvenience and pay the crew overtime.