Daniel's follow-up this week has two threads. Hannah wants to know what it's actually like to fly Air Koryo, North Korea's flag carrier. Daniel wants to know what happens when a state that's basically a cut-off tinpot dictatorship tries to align with ICAO, the global aviation coordination body. He's right that Hannah's question is the funnier one. But the two threads pull on each other.
They do, and the pulling is the interesting part. Because the airline is the state. Air Koryo is controlled by the North Korean air force. One of its two Il-62s is Kim Jong Un's personal aircraft. So when you board a flight from Beijing to Pyongyang, you are not boarding a commercial carrier in any normal sense. You're boarding a government department that happens to issue boarding passes.
A government department with a hamburger in cellophane and a neon soda.
That's the famous in-flight meal, yes. A cold hamburger on a white bun, wrapped in plastic, served with a soda that glows like antifreeze. Multiple firsthand accounts describe it with something approaching affection. The Points Guy reviewer said the plane looked, felt, and smelled properly cared for. His words were, and I'm quoting him, that's not too hard to achieve with only two flights per day.
Two flights a day is the whole schedule.
Roughly. As of last year, the scheduled international network was Pyongyang to Beijing, Shenyang, and Vladivostok. Three destinations. The fleet for international routes is six aircraft. Two Antonov one-forty-eights, two Ilyushin sixty-twos held for VIP and government use, a Tupolev one-fifty-four, and two Tupolev two-oh-fours. Average age just under thirty years.
Thirty years old and one of them is the dictator's personal jet. So the commercial fleet is really four aircraft serving three cities.
And only the Tu-two-oh-fours are allowed into European airspace. The EU banned Air Koryo outright from two thousand six to twenty twenty, citing what it called blatant systemic safety deficiencies. The ban was lifted for the newer aircraft only.
Newer meaning built sometime in the nineties.
The two-oh-four is a Russian narrow-body design from the late eighties. It's considered modern by Air Koryo standards. The rest of the fleet includes the last Ilyushin eighteen in passenger service anywhere in the world.
That's a point of pride, presumably.
For aviation enthusiasts, it's a pilgrimage. People fly Air Koryo specifically to log the aircraft types before they disappear. The Il-eighteen, the Tu-one-thirty-four, the An-twenty-four. These are Cold War airframes that most countries scrapped decades ago. North Korea kept them flying because sanctions made it nearly impossible to buy Western replacements.
And the passengers are not exactly spoiled for choice. Air Koryo held the distinction of being the world's only one-star airline on Skytrax for years.
Here's the paradox, and I think it's the thing most coverage gets wrong. The one-star rating was never really about the onboard product. Skytrax couldn't inspect the airline properly. The rating punished opacity, not service. Multiple reviewers who actually flew it said the seats were perfectly average, comparable to US domestic carriers, and the service was better than expected. One reviewer from Miles to Memories said outright, I don't think Air Koryo is the worst airline in the world.
The worst airline in the world would need to be an airline. This is something else. The flight attendants are shy and meticulously dressed. The overhead monitors play Moranbong Band videos endlessly. The only newspaper offered is the Pyongyang Times. One passenger declined the newspaper because he was afraid of breaking rules about disrespecting images of the leaders. That's not an airline experience. That's being inside a state broadcast that happens to be at thirty thousand feet.
And the cultural friction cuts both ways. One commenter reported a dozing passenger being publicly and loudly reprimanded by flight attendants on the return leg. Sleep is apparently a form of disrespect when the cabin crew decides it is.
Sleep is the sloth's sacred act. I'd have been thrown off the plane.
You'd have been the first sloth in North Korean custody.
Let's get to the booking process, because this is where the state monitoring begins before you ever see a plane.
You cannot book Air Koryo online. There is no website, no app, no codeshare. You book through a tour agency, and the agency books the flight and the visa together. The visa is not stamped in your passport. North Korea stamps a separate visa booklet, so your passport shows no evidence you were ever there. A round trip Beijing to Pyongyang would run roughly three hundred fifty dollars in economy if you could book it directly. You can't. The tour package with flight was around sixteen hundred dollars per person back in twenty fifteen.
Sixteen hundred dollars to be publicly reprimanded for napping.
And to be fair, some of the tour operators are quite good at managing expectations. Young Pioneer Tours has a whole guide to Pyongyang airport that reads like a hotel review crossed with a compliance manual.
That's the arrival experience. Daniel flagged it as where the dystopian weirdness begins and ends. What actually happens when you land?
The airport itself is not what people expect. The international terminal opened around twenty fifteen, and The Points Guy called it one of the nicest airports in the region. Brand-new sky bridges, spotless floors, a business-class lounge. Young Pioneer Tours says it has all the basic amenities. Third floor has a Western restaurant, an Asian restaurant, a bar. The bar serves a cocktail called the journalist.
The journalist.
The journalist. I have no idea what's in it. Probably nothing that makes you better at journalism.
Probably the opposite, given the venue.
The shops sell children's clothing, shoes, electronics, portable DVD players, North Korean cell phones. They accept Chinese yuan, euros, dollars, yen, and rubles. It's a functioning international airport retail environment with almost no international flights.
That's the visual that sticks with people. The Points Guy reviewer looked out the window on departure and saw one of the few other airplanes at the airport, all covered up and clearly not in use. A full modern terminal with a fleet of six and a handful of flights a week. The infrastructure of global aviation with none of its plurality.
And then the process starts. After baggage claim, customs inspects and counts your cell phones and books. Luggage tags are checked carefully. One traveler described handing over his phone to a soldier, having his camera and a tour booklet taken aside, and watching soldiers open a Tom and Jerry episode on a fellow traveler's laptop as a spot check.
They watched the cartoon?
They opened the file, watched enough to confirm it was what it claimed to be, and moved on. Whether they enjoyed it is not recorded.
The fear, not the process, is what makes it different. That's the line from one of the accounts. The actual inspection is less invasive than some countries' customs. The difference is you know the state is watching and the state has opinions about everything you're carrying.
Including books. Books are a particular concern because printed material can carry ideas. The regime's entire survival strategy depends on controlling information, so a paperback with the wrong cover can be a security incident.
And you're not just bringing your own books. The only newspaper on the plane is the Pyongyang Times. The only music is the Moranbong Band. The only videos are military-themed footage. The state has already curated the entire informational environment before you land. Customs is just the final checkpoint.
Daniel's ICAO question fits here. Because the airline operates in the international system, and the international system has rules. North Korea has been an ICAO contracting state since nineteen seventy-seven. Its civil aviation law says international conventions approved by the DPRK shall be effective as same as this law.
Same as this law. That's a strong statement for a country that also says its leader is a god.
And in twenty nineteen, North Korea's General Administration of Civil Aviation gave a presentation to ICAO's regional cooperation program. They claimed they embody ICAO standards and recommended practices. They scored seventy-seven percent on their two thousand eight universal safety oversight audit. The world average at the time was over sixty percent. They were above average.
North Korea scored above average on an international aviation safety audit.
On paper, yes. And their own presentation listed their challenges candidly. Limited resources. Aging fleet, meaning the Russian aircraft. Language proficiency. And then this line, which I find remarkable. Political matter, dash, UN sanctions affect even to civil aviation activities.
They wrote that in a slide deck to ICAO.
They did. The regime is perfectly capable of describing its situation accurately when it wants to. The gap is between paper compliance and operational reality. The EU banned Air Koryo because North Korean authorities did not adequately oversee the flag carrier, which they were obliged to do under the Chicago Convention. The EU's words were blunt. Systemic deficiencies. Failure to respond to the French civil aviation authority.
So the scorecard says one thing and the inspectors say another. That's the dictatorship alignment problem in miniature. You can sign the treaty, attend the meetings, score above the world average on the audit. But the audit measures documentation. It doesn't measure whether the maintenance logs are real or whether the person signing them is allowed to tell the truth.
And ICAO's leverage is limited. In twenty nineteen, the United States blocked an ICAO effort to improve North Korean civil aviation and revive air traffic, using it as sanctions leverage ahead of the Trump-Kim summit. The UN Security Council resolution from twenty sixteen requires member states to deny permission for North Korean flagged aircraft to take off, land, or overfly unless landing for inspection. The US Treasury sanctioned sixteen Air Koryo aircraft.
Sixteen aircraft. The fleet is six. They sanctioned planes that had already been retired, presumably.
The sanctions list includes aircraft from the older fleet. The point was to make it impossible to sell or transfer them, not just to ground them.
And then there's the GPS jamming. This is where the tinpot dictatorship meets the global system in the most direct possible way.
The ICAO Council formally condemned North Korea in May of last year for GNSS and radio frequency interference in the Incheon flight information region. Nearly forty-four hundred flights from more than twenty countries affected between October twenty twenty-four and February twenty twenty-five. That's not a hypothetical risk. That's real aircraft losing navigation signals because Pyongyang is running electronic warfare exercises.
And the same country is asking ICAO to support direct North-South flights. The secretary general said last year that the agency supports the idea, conditional on Seoul's endorsement and a safety and security assessment.
Which is the whole tension in one sentence. The agency supports the idea. The safety and security assessment is the part that never quite happens. North Korea wants the benefits of the international system without the obligations that make the system work.
The obligations are exactly what the system is. You don't align with ICAO by scoring well on a document audit. You align by not jamming the GPS of forty-four hundred flights. You align by letting inspectors see the maintenance logs. You align by not having your leader hoard a third of the national fleet for personal use.
The leader's Il-sixty-two is a detail that doesn't get enough attention. The country has six aircraft for international routes. Two of them are VIP transports. One is Kim Jong Un's personal plane. So the commercial airline is really operating four aircraft, and one of the four is a one-fifty-four that's older than most of the passengers.
What happened to the routes they used to fly? Kuala Lumpur, Kuwait City, Singapore, Bangkok.
Kuala Lumpur was banned after the Kim Jong-nam assassination at the airport in twenty seventeen. Kim Jong Un's half-brother was killed with a nerve agent by two women in the terminal. Malaysia banned Air Koryo shortly after. Kuwait banned them in twenty sixteen. The seasonal Singapore and Bangkok services just faded away as sanctions tightened.
So the network contracted from maybe a dozen international destinations to three. And those three are all places where the political relationship is strong enough to override the sanctions concerns. Beijing, Shenyang, Vladivostok.
Beijing and Shenyang are Chinese cities with large ethnic Korean populations and deep trade ties to the DPRK. Vladivostok is the Russian Far East, where North Korean laborers have been a structured part of the economy for years.
The overseas labor program. That's a whole other episode.
It is, and it connects directly to the airline. The flights aren't just carrying tourists. They're carrying workers, officials, trade delegations. The passenger mix on a Pyongyang flight is not like a normal international route.
What about Air China? Daniel asked whether Air Koryo is the only carrier that's ever operated regular flights to and from North Korea.
Air Koryo is the only North Korean carrier. It is not the only airline ever to serve the country. Air China has operated the Beijing-Pyongyang route at various points. Sam Chui noted in twenty sixteen that there were only two airlines flying to North Korea at the moment, Air China and Air Koryo. Historically, Aeroflot and CAAC transited through Pyongyang during the Sino-Soviet split. Air Koryo also ran inter-Korean charters to Seoul, Yangyang, and Busan at various points.
So the answer to Daniel's question is no, but with an asterisk. Air Koryo is the only carrier based there. Foreign airlines have come and gone depending on politics and sanctions.
And the inter-Korean charters are the interesting historical footnote. North and South Korean airlines operating flights across the world's most militarized border. It happened in fits and starts, usually during periods of diplomatic thaw.
The thaw never lasts. The flights stop. The airport goes back to being a monument to what a country could look like if it participated in the world.
That's the thing about Sunan airport. It's nice. The terminal is modern, the shops are stocked, the restaurants serve food that reviewers describe as perfectly acceptable. But it's all theater for a handful of flights a week. The state built the set of a functioning international airport and only lets a few hundred people a week see it.
Compliance theater. That's the phrase for the ICAO question. North Korea performs alignment with global standards the way it performs everything else. The documents are in order. The audit score is above average. The terminal is spotless. And the GPS is jammed and the maintenance logs are opaque and the only reason the EU let them back in is that the newer Russian aircraft are less terrifying than the old Russian aircraft.
The EU ban was lifted in twenty twenty, but only for the Tu-two-oh-fours. The older types remain banned. That's not a clean bill of health. That's a grudging acknowledgment that one specific aircraft type is probably not going to fall out of the sky.
Probably not going to fall out of the sky is the entire Air Koryo safety proposition.
And yet the reviewers keep saying the onboard product is fine. The seats are average. The flight attendants are friendly, if shy. The hamburger is cold but edible. The real discomfort is not physical. It's the knowledge that you're inside a system where every interaction is monitored and the rules can change without notice.
The dozing passenger being reprimanded. That's the detail that stays with me. On a normal airline, a sleeping passenger is a success story. On Air Koryo, it's a discipline problem. The state's need for control extends to whether your eyes are closed.
One traveler wrote that he declined the Pyongyang Times because he was afraid of accidentally disrespecting the leaders' images. Think about that. He was afraid to touch a newspaper. The fear is the product.
The fear is the product. That's the line. Air Koryo sells a perfectly ordinary flight experience wrapped in a total surveillance environment. The airline is not the point. The airline is the delivery mechanism for the state.
And the state uses the airline as a revenue source, a propaganda tool, and a diplomatic instrument all at once. The flights to Beijing and Vladivostok carry officials and workers. The in-flight entertainment broadcasts state media. The very existence of the airline is a claim to normal statehood.
A claim that ICAO is structurally unable to verify. The agency can audit documents. It can't audit reality. North Korea's seventy-seven percent audit score is a document. The EU's systemic deficiencies finding is a reality. Both are true.
That's the answer to Daniel's ICAO question in its most honest form. The alignment is real on paper and hollow in practice. The dictatorship participates in the system enough to claim legitimacy, and the system participates enough to claim universality. Neither claim survives contact with the actual flights.
And the actual flights are where Hannah's question lives. What's it actually like? The answer is that it's ordinary and terrifying at the same time. The seat is fine. The hamburger is cold. The music is endless. The customs officer counts your books. The airport is beautiful and empty. The plane is thirty years old and maintained by a military that doesn't answer to anyone.
The thirty-year-old average is worth sitting with. Most Western airlines retire aircraft at twenty to twenty-five years. Air Koryo's average is just under thirty. The Il-eighteen that's still in passenger service is from the nineteen sixties.
A sixty-year-old airliner.
The last one in passenger service anywhere in the world. Aviation enthusiasts fly to North Korea specifically to log it. It's the aviation equivalent of seeing the last passenger pigeon.
Except the passenger pigeon didn't have a cocktail called the journalist waiting for you at the other end.
The journalist cocktail is a detail I would love to know more about. No reviewer describes what's in it. I imagine it's something red and sweet and served with a paper umbrella that has a tiny camera in it.
That's probably not far off.
The broader point for Hannah is that the experience is not the disaster most people expect. The worst airline in the world label is misleading. The actual flights are short, the planes are maintained to a standard that has kept them flying for decades, and the crew is professional in a stiff, formal way. The discomfort is ambient, not acute.
Ambient discomfort. That's a good phrase. It's the background radiation of being in a place where the state sees everything and you have no recourse.
And for most tourists, the flight is the least strange part of the trip. The strange part is everything after you land. The guides, the approved itineraries, the hotel rooms with the state television that you can't turn off. The flight is just the door.
The door is a Tu-two-oh-four with a hamburger.
The door is a Tu-two-oh-four with a hamburger and a Moranbong Band video on loop.
I keep coming back to the covered airplanes. The reviewer looked out the window and saw the rest of the fleet, covered up and clearly not in use. That's the whole country in one image. The equipment is there. It's just not running.
And the terminal is there, and the shops are there, and the bar with the journalist cocktail is there. The entire apparatus of normal international travel exists in Pyongyang. It just doesn't function at the volume or with the freedom that the apparatus implies.
That's what makes it dystopian. Not the absence of infrastructure. The presence of infrastructure that's been hollowed out by politics.
The ICAO question and Hannah's question collapse into the same observation. The airline looks like an airline. The airport looks like an airport. The audit score looks like compliance. The gap between appearance and reality is the dictatorship's entire operating principle.
And the gap is maintained by force. The customs officers count your books. The flight attendants reprimand you for sleeping. The newspaper is a trap if you touch it wrong. The state is always present, always watching, always ready to turn an ordinary interaction into a security incident.
One more detail from the arrival accounts. North Korea doesn't stamp your passport. It stamps a separate visa booklet. So when you leave, your passport shows no record of the trip. You can go to South Korea afterward with a clean passport.
That's not a convenience. That's the state managing your relationship with other states. It's deciding what your travel history looks like.
It's also a small mercy for travelers who want to visit both Koreas, which is otherwise complicated by the stamps.
A small mercy from a regime that executes people for watching South Korean soap operas.
The soap opera enforcement is real and recent. The regime passed a law making it a crime to possess or distribute South Korean media. The penalties are severe.
So the same state that counts your books at customs is executing its own citizens for watching television. The airline is the friendly face of that state. The hamburger and the shy flight attendants are the friendly face.
And the friendly face is what Hannah asked about. What's it actually like? The honest answer is that it's fine, and that's the disturbing part. The airline is not a horror show. It's a functioning carrier with old planes and a limited network. The horror is the context.
The context is the product. The flight is just the delivery mechanism.
I think that's the thing to leave with. If you fly Air Koryo, you will probably have an unremarkable flight. The seat will be fine. The meal will be strange but edible. The airport will be clean and empty. And the entire time, you will know that you are inside a system that does not consider you a customer. You are a guest of the state, and the state is watching.
A guest of the state with a cold hamburger and a neon soda.
Hilbert: They're right about the hamburger.
You've flown it?
Hilbert: Nineteen eighty-eight. I was in Vladivostok for a shipping company, and we chartered an Air Koryo An-twenty-four to move a crew to Pyongyang for a port inspection. The hamburger was cold then too. The bun was sweet. Like a dinner roll with a hamburger patty inside.
The neon soda.
Hilbert: Green. Tasted like melted lollipop. We all drank it because there was nothing else. The flight attendant watched us drink it like she was counting.
The counting is the thing. The customs officers count your books and phones. The flight attendants count your sips.
Hilbert: The real problem in eighty-eight was the fuel. The An-twenty-four had a range that was fine on paper, but the plane we got had been flying since the sixties and the fuel gauges were optimistic. We landed in Pyongyang with what the pilot said was enough fuel for another forty minutes. He said it through the intercom like he was announcing the weather.
The pilot announced the fuel state?
Hilbert: In Korean and then in Russian. The Russian part was for us. He sounded proud. Like the plane had done him a favor.
The An-twenty-four is a rugged aircraft. Short takeoff and landing, designed for rough fields. The North Koreans flew them for decades.
Hilbert: The one we were on had curtains instead of overhead bins. The luggage went in a net at the back. One of our guys had a hard hat, and the flight attendant made him take it off and hold it in his lap for the whole flight. She said it was a safety hazard. In a plane with curtains.
The safety standards are selective.
Hilbert: The thing nobody mentions is the airport in the eighties. The old terminal was a concrete box with a mural of the leaders on every wall. You walked in and there were four soldiers and a dog. The dog was the friendliest one there. They checked our papers for an hour and a half. The port inspection took twenty minutes.
The infrastructure has always been out of proportion to the traffic.
Hilbert: The new terminal is nicer, from what I hear. But the process is the same. They count things. They watch you. They decide when you're done. The only difference now is the floors are shinier.
You went back?
Hilbert: No. The shipping company folded in ninety-one. I still have the boarding pass from that flight. It's a piece of cardboard with a handwritten seat number. The seat number was wrong. There were no seat numbers.
That's a perfect artifact of the whole system. A boarding pass for a seat that didn't exist.
Hilbert: The pass said seat four A. The plane had benches along the sides. Like a military transport. We sat facing each other for two hours.
That's the detail that gets lost in the modern reviews. The current product is a Tu-two-oh-four with actual seats. The older experience was closer to a cargo hold with pretensions.
Hilbert: The pretensions were the point. They gave us a boarding pass for a seat that didn't exist because boarding passes are what airlines do. The airline was the state pretending to be an airline. The boarding pass was the proof.
That connects to the ICAO question directly. The documents exist. The seat doesn't. The audit score exists. The safety oversight doesn't. The terminal exists. The traffic doesn't.
Hilbert: The journalist cocktail. That's new. They didn't have that in eighty-eight. We got tea in a glass with a metal holder. The holder was engraved with the name of a different shipping company.
A different shipping company.
Hilbert: Some Soviet outfit. They'd reused the glassware. I drank my tea and wondered if the other company had made it out.
That's the whole thing in a tea glass. The state reuses everything, including the props of other people's commerce.
Hilbert: The fuel gauge was the part that stayed with me. Forty minutes of fuel on landing. The pilot announced it like a weather report. That was the moment I understood what the airline was. It wasn't a safety issue to them. It was a normal Tuesday.
A normal Tuesday with forty minutes of fuel and a sweet hamburger.
Hilbert: The hamburger was fine. I'd eat it again.
That might be the most generous review Air Koryo has ever received.
Hilbert: It's the truth. The hamburger was fine. The rest of it was the problem.
The misconception people hold about Air Koryo is that it's the worst airline in the world because the service is terrible. The reality is the service is average and the rating punished opacity, not experience. The airline is not bad at being an airline. It's bad at being a normal participant in the international system, because the state that runs it has no interest in normal participation.
And that's the correction. The one-star label was a transparency punishment. The actual flights are unremarkable. The remarkable part is everything around them, the counting, the watching, the empty terminal, the covered planes, the GPS jamming, the audit score that says one thing while the fuel gauge says another. The airline is a delivery mechanism for a state that cannot align with global standards because alignment would require giving up control.
The open question is whether the inter-Korean flights ever actually happen. ICAO says it supports them. Seoul has not endorsed them. If they launch, Air Koryo would have to meet South Korean safety and security standards, which means inspectors in the maintenance hangars. That's the one thing the regime has never allowed.
And that's the test. Not the audit score. Whether the hangar doors open.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing.
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