With its ageing fleet, timeworn cabins and flight attendants prone to confiscating the cameras of passengers who ignore its ban on photography, there are very few reasons to commend Air Koryo.
Indeed, the North Korean carrier has been named the worst in the world by the aviation website Skytrax for the last five years in a row. Previous passengers have described "perfunctory" emergency procedures, fizzy drinks that are "difficult to identify" and "uncomfortably loud" engine noise, while photographers on board its oldest aircraft have captured cockpits without digital screens and seats that fold forward.
But not everyone agrees with the scathing verdicts.
“It’s a bit of a giggle, actually,” said Simon Cockerell of Koryo Tours, an independent Beijing-based travel company that specialised in trips to North Korea, told Associated Press.
While his firm has no affiliation to Air Koryo, its customers frequently fly on the state-owned airline.
“It’s not Emirates,” Cockerell said, referring to the number one airline in the Skytrax rankings. “It’s not quite the flying experience people are used to… [but] they are clearly not the world’s worst airline.”
Yes, the cabin crew tend not to speak foreign languages very well, he admits, there is no in-flight magazine, the meals are pretty poor (a sorry looking burger the staple offering), and due to the age of some aircraft condensation from the cooling systems tends to drip on passengers and dampen the seats.
Furthermore, the in-flight entertainment usually consists of patriotic odes to the leader and indecipherable North Korean cartoons.
But there have been plenty of improvements in recent years. Careless habits, such as skipping the pre-flight safety demonstration and not announcing when the plane is about to land, are a thing of the past; a new airport terminal, featuring a business-class lounge, was recently unveiled; and newer aircraft, acquired as recently as 2008, are used on international services (it currently flies to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang and Vladivostok).
Some of the passenger reviews on Skytrax’s own website are in fact complimentary.
“Service was perfectly passable,” wrote one UK user last month.
“The burger was quite tasty and I got a beer with it,” said another.
It’s also widely considered to be safe. Dozens of airlines, including all those based in Libya, Mozambique, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Zambia, are banned from EU airspace. However, the majority of Air Koryo’s fleet is permitted to enter.
"I'm not sure that I've ever seen or heard any references to Air Koryo being unsafe, only that its service is terrible," Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and author, told Associated Press.
"Everything about North Korea is seen as a kind of running joke, so we should probably expect that its airline is seen this way too, right or wrong. Some of the world's best and safest airlines are carriers the average American has never heard of."
The only known fatal accident Air Koryo has suffered was in 1983 when the airline was still named CAAK, according to Harro Ranter, founder and director of the Aviation Safety Network, which has compiled detailed descriptions of over 10,700 incidents, hijackings and accidents going back to the 1950s.
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