What’s it like to fly to North Korea?

One of the only ways into North Korea is through China. From Beijing there are daily flights on Air Koryo, the North Korean state-run airline. The planes they operate, at least for these daily flights to Pyonyang, are fairly new and modern, built in the 1990’s, and they feel just like any Boing 737 or Airbus A320 you may have recently boarded. But they are not. They are Russian-made Tupolev 204′s. We sat in the back mysteriously curtained-off quarter of the plane, which appeared to be reserved for westerners but I’ve been told that’s not the case and that it is not unusual to sit among the natives on these flights.

The first thing you notice in this section of the plane is the presence of two uniformed government security officers. They don’t try to be discrete. They want you to know they are there and what purpose they serve. They observe you intensely throughout the entire flight. What are you reading? Are you taking pictures? Of what?

It’s such a strange sensation to feel this watched. Our section of the plane wasn’t filled so my two travel companions and I each had a row of three seats to ourselves. One of the security officers sat down next to me about an hour into the flight as I was taking some pictures and video inside the cabin. He didn’t overtly object to anything I was doing but it did feel a bit intrusive and while he was there I became very self-conscious. We surmised their actions were meant to just send the message that eyes were upon us and we shouldn’t forget it.

A North Korean Air Koryo attendant wears a pin showing portraits of the late North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, while she prepares the cabin before take off for Pyongyang from Beijing, China.Upon boarding, the odd and the curious began to stand out to me. Every North Korean on the plane, from the flight attendants to military personnel to the “businessmen” was wearing a lapel pin displaying the portrait of Kim Il-Sung, the founder and deceased eternal President of the country. Some pins also included the portrait of also-deceased former ruler Kim Il-Sung’s son, Kim Jong-Il. The pins are such a presence in the country that we almost never saw someone who wasn’t wearing one. To not wear a pin regularly might almost be seen as an act of disloyalty – and given that anyone’s friends and neighbors might report them for such acts, ordinary citizens tend to publicly overstate their devotion to the regime at every opportunity. I began to think of the entire North Korean society as a bit sect-like. And as on a commune where everyone might be referred to as brother this or sister that, North Koreans refer to each other as “comrade” and they generously salt their conversations with references to the Dear Leader. As in…

  “How was your day?”

“It was hard, but not nearly as hard as that of the Dear Leader who has the weight of the Korean People’s future on his great and mighty shoulders.”

These pins are not available to foreigners. You can’t buy them and they aren’t given as gifts. They are not trivialized. You are meant to be North Korean to own one and you’d better not go more than two days in a row without wearing one if you know what’s good for you! They are worn on the lapel of respectable clothing. Citizens are excused from sporting one if they are dressed for hard manual labor.

The next thing I noticed was what was playing on the plane’s TV monitors. It was like bad 70′s TV variety show esthetics mixed with Stalinist patriotic propaganda. Idealistic scenes of North Koreans with happy and fulfilling lives wash across the screens. Young lovers walking among the flowers and beautiful landscapes of North Korean paradise are intermixed with shots of military parades and trainings meant to display the country’s readiness for anything. This is all set to music. Pop music? Rock music? No way. The country is on a pretty strict diet of hymn-like anthems and marches.

It’s not that the people don’t love pop, rock, blues, soul, and funk. It’s that they’ve never even been exposed to it. Bruce Springsteen? They’ve never heard the name. Elvis? Michael Jackson? Nope. How about the recent pop sensation Psy from South Korea who sings Gangnam Style in their language? The song shocked one of our minders when we played it for him. He had never heard it or anything like it and didn’t seem too thrilled to hear of a South Korean who had become world famous – although, a friend of mine who travels to North Korea frequently tells me that most North Koreans are vicariously proud of the South’s international achievements and that the minders are a bit more versed in international pop culture than the average citizen, who would certainly be completely clueless.