Air Koryo is an airline run by the North Korean government, and it’s consistently rated as the worst airline in the world. In fact, it’s the only airline with a one-star rating on airline-review site Skytrax. See for yourself what it’s like to fly on Air Koryo — the worst airline in the world.
Produced by Will Wei. Video footage courtesy of Just Planes and David Flack.
Skytrax Review:
Air Koryo is certified with the 1-Star Airline Rating for the standard of its Onboard product and service, and for the Air Koryo home base Airport service standards. The Airport Rating is based on Air Koryo operations at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport, North Korea.
And from another Source experience:
Photographer Aram Pan was greeted by smiling Air Koryo flight attendants dressed in smart navy blue outfits before he boarded an Ilyushin Il-18 plane, a large turboprop airliner. The Soviet aircraft was first flown in 1957 .
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.
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’.
Source: techinsider.io & dailymail.co.uk
Photo credit: Aram Pan