Kim Jong Un ditches personal jet, boards Chinese plane in cat-and-mouse journey

SINGAPORE: North Korea’s capacity for distraction and sleight of hand was on show Sunday as leader Kim Jong Un flew to Singapore for his summit with US President Donald Trump. No fewer than three aircraft made their way to Singapore from Pyongyang airport, a facility that frequently sees fewer than three international flights a day. One of them was the ageing Soviet-made Ilyushin-62 that is Kim’s personal jet — officially known as “Chammae-1”, or Goshawk-1, after the North’s national bird but perhaps more memorably dubbed “Air Force Un”. But while Singapore is well within its range, questions have been raised about its reliability and Kim, it turned out, was not on board. Instead he flew on an Air China Boeing 747. According to flight tracking website Flightradar24, it took off using flight number CA122, a standard designation for the airline’s route from Pyongyang to Beijing. In midair it changed its callsign to CA061 and headed south.