North Korea's first air show featured model planes and American-made helicopters

A model plane performs at North Korea&#039;s first air show — (Image credit: Ed Jones/Getty Images)

North Korea held its first air show Sunday, and only two of the planes were remote-controlled scale models.

Intriguingly, one of the models was a miniature American F-16, an odd choice for the isolated, communist nation whose government regularly declares its hatred for the United States. Likewise odd, another demonstration featured U.S.-made Hughes MD 500 military-use helicopters, which in theory should not be in North Korea thanks to U.S. sanctions.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.