Cockpit photo exposes North Korean pilot using a ridiculous lace-trimmed ejection seat headrest cover

August 5, 2015 North Korea, Troubled Areas
David Cenciotti

Is this a standard cockpit adornment?

Screenshots from a video aired by the North Korean state television were posted yesterday by Alert5 military aviation site.

While cockpit footage from inside a North Korean Su-25 jet is quite rare, what is even more interesting is the weird (at least by Western standards) adornment exposed by the video.

Indeed, as noticed by our friend Tim Robison, Editor in Chief of AEROSPACE, the magazine of the Royal Aeronautical Society, there is some lace-trimmed cover on the ejection seat headrest.

Whether this is a standard decoration or a pilot customization is still open to debate; for sure it doesn’t seem to be made of fire-resistant material as one should expect from almost everything inside the cockpit.

Image credit: Alert5

 

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David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.

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7 Comments

    • Nice catch. Given it looks like standard issue, likely an item of propaganda – which “trumps” function in the world of North Korea. Can anyone read the inscription?

  3. How many of those brightly-painted CAG birds are at any at all risk of facing other fighter aircraft? I well remember the rapid toning-down of all markings on U.S. military aircraft that followed the Iran hostage crisis. It was a hell of a long time before any artwork or colour re-appeared and you can be sure that if things get ugly with a country that has a viable air force, it will happen again.

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