Micheal wrote:
Just the high council and glorious leader.
Ever see a picture of Kim Jong Il? He doesn't maintain that on a 950 calorie a day diet.
You noticed, eh?
I should point out that 950 calories a day is living large over there; the pilots only get 850 a day when not training. Like I pointed out before this even applies to their MiG-29 pilots (the country has only about 40 MiG-29s and these are used to protect Pyongyang) which is their only modern fighter (unless you count the Su-25, which is really an attack aircraft like an A-10, not a fighter, and even then it's not spring chicken).
The rest of their Air Force ranges from recently obsolete (MiG-23) to **** ancient (MiG-17). The Wikipedia page shows strong signs of being written by wanktards, since it refers to the MiG-23 as still being "on par with modern fighters" when "properly maintained and flown by experiencd pilots", an assertion that might hold true if it were also flown against modern aricraft with inexperienced pilots, poor maintenance, or limited availability of missiles. Worse, it refers to the MiG-17 as a "serious threat in a dogfight" based on agility and high-powered guns, right after acknowledging that it is slow and lacks radar, which makes one wonder why anyone would need to dogfight it in the first place.
The MiG-29 does seem to have the R-77 (AA-12) missile available to it, which could be quite dangerous; it's generally comparable to the AIM-120 AMRAAM, but without any sort of AWACS aircraft or even modern SAM search radars the MiG-29 would need to use its own radar to search for targets, or search visually, thereby either giving away its position farther away than it can detect enemies or else eliminating the range advantage of the R-77.