Episode 117: DPRK Dreamin' (Wonsan Air Festival 10 Year Retrospective)

But this episode is my, previously teased, my 10 year retrospective on the Wonsan International Air Festival, Air Friendship Festival.

i think was its full

title

air friendship

wow wonsan international friendship air festival the north korean the one and only north korean air show never repeated never bettered probably the most insane air show i've ever been to in my life and dare i say might ever go to uh 10 years later it was in september 2016 looking back on it 10 years later and telling the full story like some sort of expose but telling the full story because people might have read the review and i'm sure you know people who maybe know me on facebook or know other people who've been may have seen you know photos of the north korean migs and sukois and stuff like that the airliners but there's so much more to this show than just the aircraft that were there and you

sound like the air tattoo is saying that

I mean one sign is what the air tattoo DBH have one sign international air festival bed sheets okay Chuck notice there's so much the whole show is just one big experience I'm going to be up front and say I basically did this talk as a presentation in my company so I have like a slide deck that I built for it now that obviously doesn't isn't going to be in this podcast and we haven't got around to like we didn't think oh let's actually maybe record this as a video anyway so we didn't do that so apologies I'm going to try not to rely too much on the photos for the content but it's more for me to go through with the narrative and Gordon and Dan will be able to enjoy the photos many of which they've already seen a dozen times before when I dump them in the group chat and say look you guys look what I saw and you didn't

and every single time I've been round to your house as well

and every time Dan comes round and I remind him and all of that but I mean it's it's it is extraordinary so where do we start 10 years on and for those that don't know this this may be new to some people that 10 years ago September 2016 there was an air show two-day air show held in North Korea which even now sounds like nonsense it sounds like absolute fantasy and still 10 years on feels like it hard to believe that it happened and yet it did it very much did um Came away with some extraordinary memory.

So an airshow in North Korea.

How did how on earth did that come about? What on earth led to that happening? Well, actually some people may know going into the airshow 2016 um for many years they'd actually been doing aviation tour well to to start a little bit broader than that people think how on earth do you go to north korea in the first place well there were ways to visit as a tourist um you could also visit so educational things obviously some limited business maybe but you could visit as a tourist they had a tourist ability or capability sorts of options for the country it was a very really good way of bringing in foreign exchange which was very rare and very very valuable to them to have actual foreign currency coming into the country and one of those tourist things that happened tourist activities was aviation tours run by a few different companies i think but primarily by actually british company called juche travel services And what these tours often were, they involved the Air Koryo, the state and only airline of the country, Air Koryo, national airline, which maintained pretty much exclusively a fleet of old Soviet airliners, Ilyushins, Tupolevs, Antonovs.

And those tours, you could fly on them, you could take pictures of them, didn't often involve the entire fleet i don't think but you you got good you know exposure to quite a lot of those those airliners and that was something i'd already be looking at i'd already been i'd seen people who'd been on them before and i was already starting to think well you know i wasn't back then i wasn't massively into airliners per se but old soviet airliners you know who who doesn't like those and i was already looking at doing these tours or considering one of these tours when all of a sudden in i think around january or february 2016 suddenly and i actually don't remember how i first heard about it but it it made waves pretty quickly suddenly this a website comes out advertising An air show.

An air show in North Korea.

Now, that was already quite interesting.

They had a website up.

It doesn't exist anymore, but you can find it on Wayback Machine still.

And it was advertising...

I mean, an air show.

There was no other word.

It was basically an air show.

The most extraordinary thing about it that really hooked people was the fact that from the off, they were advertising that the Korean People's Army Air Force, the North Korean Air Force, were taking part.

in the flying display.

According to the website, I got some screen grabs here, a number of aircraft types are anticipated to take part, including MiG-21, MiG-29, Sukhoi Su-25, and Strangely Or not so strangely It made sense but it doesn't sound right Hughes MD500 helicopter And then they would also be parked up At the airport As a static display When they weren't flying So it was taking part at Wonsan International Airport, which is on the east side of the peninsula.

It also said the Air Koryo aircraft, which was obviously what I was interested in beforehand, would be taking part.

All the various airliners, Ilyushins, Tupolevs, Antonovs, etc., a few helicopters, they would take part in the flying display.