The Dear Leader may or may not be on his sick bed, the nuclear talks are on the rocks, so what does North Korea do? It holds its major autumn air exercise.

Only, instead of impressing the outside world, it only makes some analysts snicker.

Read the latest blurb in NightWatch, a free daily intel wrapup available here:

Several press sources, among them the South Korean service Yonhap, described a recent North Korean air exercise along the western coast as “massive”.  The Yonhap article cited 170 sorties per day as its measure of a “massive” exercise.

With about 700 fighters in the North Korean inventory, most of which are pre-Vietnam War era designs, a few days of 170 sorties per day signifies the pilots are getting in their mandatory minimum of ten hours a year of flight time. This is the period of the year in which pilots are required to make up for any shortage of flight hours, prior to the onset of the Winter Training Cycle on or about 1 December.

The exercise undoubtedly had other tactical objectives, but autumn exercises are almost always the last chance for pilots to get in their required flight hours. Mind, ten hours a year is normal for most North Korean pilots and marginal for almost all other air forces. The North is 100% dependent on imports of aviation fuel and thus restricts flying time to save hard currency.

Readers should understand that 170 sorties a day for an air force with 700 fighters is embarrassingly few.  A full force surge of all combat aircraft would be 700 sorties per day. That would come close to “massive,” and give every pilot at least one sortie that day, presuming the North still has one pilot for every aircraft which is not confirmed.  The North might in fact have more aircraft than pilots.

The North Korean air force is estimated regularly to have flown almost ten times that many sorties in annual exercises twenty years ago, when the air frames were newer; Gross Domestic Product was increasing; and imported fuel supplies matched demand.  The force no longer is capable of those numbers. That is the actual significance of today’s report. A flight day that features 170 combat sorties means that the air force now can only surge about 25 percent of its aircraft in a single effort.  In other words, the air force has lost 75 percent of its capabilities since 1988.  The wonder is that the MiG-21 Fishbeds still fly at all.

Well, maybe North Korea’s air force isn’t much good anymore but the Hermit Kingdom still appears to have a couple of Fat Boys stored in a granite shaft somewhere. Only question is: can they fit on a Taepodong rocket warhead?