North Korea Opens Its Doors For Aviation Tours

North Korea Opens Its Doors For Aviation Tours

Juche Travel gave 49 people interested in Soviet-era aircraft the opportunity to tour North Korea, where the largest stockpile of flyable Soviet aircraft are based.

Behind the curtain of North Korea’s official domestic airline: Soviet-era planes and censored in-flight entertainment on the world’s only ‘one-star’ carrier (but maybe eat before boarding)
A deserted airport customs lounge, luggage weighed by hand on an old fashioned scale and a cockpit with no digital assistance, are just some of the sites a photographer from Singapore has captured on camera after flying with the world’s only one-star airline.
Aram Pan gained unprecedented access to the Soviet-era planes still used in North Korea by the nation’s civil carrier, Air Koryo, plus cargo transporters and helicopters, after joining a tour for aviation enthusiasts inside the communist enclave.
From the photos, the airline, which was founded in 1950 as a joint North Korean-Soviet partnership to connect the capital Pyongyang with Moscow, appears to be stuck in a time warp.

The cockpit in the Ilyushin Il-18 plane, a large turboprop airliner that first flew in 1957, is a long way from digital. Astonishingly, the flight’s communication officer appears to sit in the passenger seating area and listens in to air traffic control on an ancient pair of headphones.
While the Ilyushin Il-18 is known for its durability, with many planes achieving over 45,000 flight hours, there is a bold contrast in its appearance to modern aircrafts.

Skytrak, an airline review service, rated Air Koryo a dismal one-star but gave it three stars for ‘staff grooming and presentation’.
And in March 2006, due to safety and maintenance concerns, Air Koryo was banned from flying into the European Union. In March 2010, the airline was allowed to resume operations but only with their TU-204s aircraft.
‘At first I was a little nervous about flying,’ Mr Pan, who was on his third trip to North Korea, told Daily Mail Australia.
However, he said after his first flight in a historic plane ‘it wasn’t scary at all’.

‘I was constantly looking forward to the next joyride. Besides… there were 48 other members of the tour group and everyone was like a kid in the candy store. I couldn’t possibly be nervous with everyone so psyched up about every ride,’ he added.
Mr Pan flew out to North Korea with UK based company Juche Travel, who have been running DPRK aviation tours for the past three years.
‘The DPRK is now the only country in the world where you can reliably fly on all major Soviet era aircraft in one place,’ their website informs.
From the 11-20 September, the flyers experienced eight different aircraft types on both scheduled international and internal charter flights.

In Mr Pan’s revealing photos, he shows the empty airport customs area at Pyongyang, the main airport serving North Korea, as well as a glimpse at the revamped International Airport which looks set to open in 2015.
A new airport isn’t the only update North Korea is making to its airline. In 2013, Air Koryo appeared to be making efforts to update its image to the outside world, changing the uniforms worn by flight attendants from red and white to navy blue with a white studded trim.
Flight attendants smile in the smart outfits in Mr Pan’s photos, their black hair swept back into chic buns.
‘The air stewardess are polite and soft spoken. From what I understand, they never leave the plane to change shifts at Kuala Lumpur,’ Mr Pan said after his international flight.
Inside the plane, entertainment is limited to only one channel playing their DPRK dramas and documentaries but the seats do fold down for extra leg room.