KIM JONG UN, North Korea's dictator, is regularly compared to a Bond villain. His long list of misdeeds, self-aggrandisement and geopolitical posturing would be laughable if it were fiction and not sobering nuclear-backed reality. Like its supreme leader, North Korea’s flag-carrier, Air Koryo, also occupies a role as a pantomime baddy, with a reputation for unprofessional service, bad food, old planes and awful in-flight entertainment consisting of propaganda music videos of patriotic song. Photography is reportedly banned and even benign acts such as screwing up a newspaper with Mr Kim's image on it can apparently result in a stern reprimand.

Little surprise, then, that for the fourth year running Air Koryo props up the Skytrax star rating system for airlines. It is the only carrier with the unenviable award of just one star. Critics of the rating point to the carrier’s safety record. Air Koryo has suffered just one fatal accident in over 30 years, although in this it is helped by the fact it operates just four regular routes: three to China and one to Vladivostok. A curtailed network also means that its poor service is rarely inflicted on business travellers. Sanctions and a host of other factors mean that travel opportunities into North Korea are extremely limited, so being the bad boy of the airways is an irrelevance to most. Indeed the carrier's comic reputation for old stock and shoddy service has created a cottage industry for curious travellers and plane enthusiasts, many of whom are far more positive in their recent Skytrax reviews of the airline.