Yep, one of the oldest tricks in the book...
American Airlines got in trouble after the 1995 Cali crash because they pointed out in their manuals that Hispanics were rumored to do the old bomb threat trick if they were running late (punctuality is not the custom in many latin countries from my experience).
See:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/pilotguide2.html
Of course, you just can't say that in the politically correct U.S. these days, whether or not it may be true.
Here's another recent example of the old "bomb threat to delay the flight" trick:
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Fake SFO Bomb Threat Gets Man Prison Time
Stacy Finz, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, May 6, 2000
San Francisco -- A St. Louis man who called in a bogus bomb threat to San Francisco International Airport in hopes of delaying his girlfriend's plane so she could make her flight to Seoul was sentenced yesterday to 10 months in federal prison.
Flavio Mendoza, 35, was convicted of giving false information that endangered an aircraft in flight and faced a maximum penalty of 20 years behind bars.
During yesterday's hearing, Mendoza's attorney called her client's behavior an anomaly and asked the judge to release him, giving him credit for the two months he has already served in jail and two months in a halfway house.
Defense attorney Shawn Halbert said that Mendoza, a student at the University of St. Louis, will pay for his foolish mistake in other ways. She said it will probably cost him deportation back to his native Bolivia with little chance of ever returning to the United States. And, he now faces a lawsuit from the Federal Aviation Administration, she said. ``This has been devastating for him,'' Halbert said. ``He feels like his whole life has been ruined and that everything he has ever done has been wasted.
``He was the one in his family that everyone went to for advice, the one everyone looked up to,'' she said. ``There's no doubt that he'll never do it again. That was the one worst moment he has ever had.''
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Dave Hall fired back, ``That worst moment of his life created the worst moments of the lives of the plane's crew.'' Hall told the court that the plane's pilot learned of the bomb threat when he was 30,000 feet in the air.
``The seriousness of that is something the court has to balance,'' said Hall, who argued in favor of the probation report's recommendation of a 10-month prison term.