Emirates Airline it’s decidedly not, but North Korea’s flag carrier Air Koryo has strived to improve its inflight product in recent years. The state-run airline rolled out “new planes, new in-flight entertainment options, [and] smart new uniforms for the cabin attendants,” this year, noted Bloomberg News. The airline also added several new destinations recently, including flights from Pyongyang to Bangkok and Kuwait City. The Kuwait City flight is used primarily to transport the thousands of North Korean workers who are thought to toil in the Arab monarchy; the other destinations and product upgrades are designed to entice more useful idiots, fellow travelers, and washed-up NBA stars to opt to vacation in the that theme park of totalitarianism.
But Air Koryo has run into headwinds of late. It hasn’t operated its Kuwait flight since at least February, notes NK News. The Bangkok flight has reportedly also been scuttled.
The airline business is notoriously tough. Warren Buffett once wrote that, “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.” But Air Koryo isn’t just learning a belated lesson in market forces. It’s also a victim of Kim Jong-un’s regime’s idiocy.
After North Korea’s most recent nuclear test, the United Nations leveled tough new sanctions on the regime. Under the new sanctions, North Korea can no longer import aviation fuel. Even China, North Korea’s only (sort-of) ally, has stopped exporting jet fuel to the North. Air Koryo can still purchase fuel at foreign airports, though with North Korea facing a cash crunch—also a partial result of the sanctions that Kim’s needless provocations have invited—this will be increasingly difficult. And the airline will still need to find fuel to leave North Korea; that looks like an increasingly tough task for the airline.
Air Koryo’s descent is more evidence of the foolishness of Kim Jong-un’s byungjin policy. Byungjin holds that North Korea can simultaneously pursue nuclear weapons and economic development—both guns and butter. A big part of the economic development component is tourism; Kim sees big gains in foreign currency from the thousands of foreigners who visit North Korea on package tours every year, and he wants more. That his nuclear policies are now directly hobbling his economic development goals seems lost on the Grand Marshal.
Oh well. There’s always the train.
