North Korea's Air Koryo has been operating for 65 years yet it was still touted as the worst airline in the world for four consecutive years, according to The Telegraph.
Website SkyTrax, which rates the different airlines all over the world, gave Air Koryo a depressing one-star rating. It's also the only airline to receive such a low rating out of the 197 airlines reviewed.
Aside from being state-owned, the aircrafts were also acquired from the Soviet Union reportedly after the Cold War ended.
These factors have made SkyTrax bring to light its "questionable safety and rudimentary safety belts" aside from the other missing commodities that modern airplanes offer their passengers.
Despite being named the "worst airline in the world" for four years, however, the Associated Press revealed that "experts and frequent Air Koryo passengers" would disagree with the one-star rating.
"The airline is a definitely a unique ride, but fairly reliable, they say. The SkyTrax ratings are focused on service and not safety," the AP article continued.
Simon Cockerell of the Beijing-based Koryo Group, a travel agency which specializes in North Korea, said that while Air Koryo is "not quite the flying experience people are used to," it's "clearly not the world's worst airline."
"I'm not sure that I've ever seen or heard any references to Air Koryo being unsafe, only that its service is terrible," airline pilot who also maintains the "Ask The Pilot" blog, Patrick Smith, reportedly told the AP in an email. "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."
The Russia-made planes may not be as comfortable as their American counterparts but according to Smith, they were "not unsound."
Harro Ranter also noted that the airline's only fatal accident was in 1983, adding that It scored high on an audit conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization in 2008.
"If these results are still valid, there is no reason to assume that Air Koryo would be unsafe," Ranter reportedly told AP.
