One hundred dollars, one way. That’s what North Korea is now charging for a domestic plane ticket from Chongjin to Pyongyang. Convert an ordinary factory worker’s official monthly wage into dollars and you get something like 50 cents — meaning a single ticket would eat up to seventeen years of wages, saved without spending a cent, and even then it has to be paid in dollars, not local currency. Around the same time, [CNN cameras happened](https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/23/world/video/north-korea-flight-attendants-will-ripley-wonsan-vrtc-hnk-digvid) to catch a different scene at Wonsan airport: Air Koryo flight attendants goofing around and taking selfies before boarding. Correspondent Will Ripley called it “an ordinary moment you rarely get to see in North Korea.” Set the two images side by side and a pattern starts to emerge. This isn’t a heartwarming story about a closed-off country finally opening its skies to its people. It’s a much more uncomfortable one, about whose sacrifice paid for the fuel and whose convenience it’s actually serving...

The Dark Reality Behind Air Koryo’s "Domestic" Flights