But that wasn’t soon enough for Sied van Riel and Wilco Jung, a Dutch DJ and filmmaker who wanted to come to Miami for Ultra Music Festival, the three-day electronic music bonanza that starts Friday in Bicentennial Park.

The two figured they could fill a plane with fans. Jung said so on Twitter.

Via the social networking site, KLM challenged: “You try to fill the plane, we’ll try to fly!”

“I was very surprised, because KLM is a big company and we were just basically fooling around not even having the intention of getting a plane or trying to arrange a plane,” van Riel said Friday in a phone interview from the Netherlands.

AIRLINE OFFER

KLM’s offer was this: The airline would start its new service early if 150 people signed up for the flight in a week’s time, KLM said on its blog. Jung and van Riel, 32, created a website and hit the required number within hours.

Enough people got on board that the airline is sending two flights ahead of schedule: one on Monday carrying 178 people and another on Wednesday with 280 passengers. They’re paying a premium: As of late Friday, a ticket on that Amsterdam-to-Miami leg was 653 Euros, compared to 321 Euros if you stopped in Detroit. The party crew can fly back to Amsterdam next week for 282 Euros nonstop.
KLM’s regular schedule will include four nonstop flights a week on the route.

“It became clear to KLM very quickly that the idea of a direct flight to Miami is a popular one among the Dutch dance scene,” the airline’s vice president of e-commerce, Martijn van der Zee, said in a statement on the company’s website. “We can rightly call it a first — the first time KLM will deploy an aircraft following a request on Twitter.”

KLM says it believes it is the first airline ever to deploy a plane based on a Twitter bet. And it’s certainly the first time Miami International Airport spokesman Greg Chin has heard of such a thing.

‘THAT’S AMAZING’
“That’s amazing,” he said. “Maybe this is the wave of the future.”

For his part, van Riel said he typically expects airlines to follow up on Twitter questions about problems with flights or cancellations, but he didn’t expect the response he and Jung got from KLM.

“It’s ridiculous when you think of it,” he said, noting that his request was: “We need a jet because we want to party. And they said ‘OK.’”

On Monday night, his flight is scheduled to arrive in Miami with 178 people — Dutch DJs, dance music fans, record label executives, bloggers and more — on board. From there, a DJ spinoff at the Mondrian Hotel in South Beach awaits.

But the party will have started long before the wheels touch down.

The flight will have a DJ booth, van Riel said, and a cocktail bar.

“It’ll probably be a constant party because everybody knows each other,’’ he said. “And we’re going to Miami, so it’ll be pretty wicked.”