[11] During the early period of the war, the Il-10 Beasts were the main bombers used in the strikes against airfields in South Korea, while Yak-9/9P Franks as well other trainer and fighter aircraft were used in CAP and Strafing attacks.

[12] At the same time, USAF B-29 Superfortresses, P-80Cs, F-51 Mustangs and B-26 Invaders began to attack ground targets inside North Korea, encountering very little resistance from the KPAF.

[16] Kim Il Sung reportedly told the North Korean pilots "to fight in the war as if the Vietnamese sky were their own.

[18] In 1973, a North Korean flight of MiG-21s deployed to Bir Arida to help defend southern Egypt during the October 1973 War.

According to a 2021 report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency, the most modern assets of the KPAF are the MiG-29 and MiG-23, while the Su-25 ground attack and Ilyushin Il-28 bomber aircraft are also deemed by the DIA as having some capability.

The DIA assesses that the North Koreans would be unable to prevail in combat against US forces "overwhelming advantages in power projection, strategic air superiority, and precision-guided standoff strike capability," and would face "considerable difficulty" against South Korean air defences, relying mostly on Antonov An-2 transports for inserting special forces into South Korea and UAVs for intelligence gathering and supplementing the air force ground attack capabilities.

The War Zone states that while it's unlikely that Russia will be able to transfer these aircraft on a short-term at least (with the Russian aerospace industry busy keeping the Russian Air Force fleets operational during the war in Ukraine), the delivery of these aircraft would provide a "modest − but badly needed − modernization" for the KPAF.

[22][21] Ilyushin Il-28 Beagle bombers provide a medium-range attack platform, despite being generally obsolete, although it is likely they have the ability to launch Kh-35 and P-15 Termit missiles.

[24] A large part of the ground attack aircraft are kept in heavily fortified hangars, some of which are capable of withstanding a nearby nuclear blast.

[26] Several were seen equipped with Soviet AT-3 anti-tank missiles during a military parade commemorating 60 years since Korean War armistice.

[28] The KPAF possesses precision guided munitions such as Kh-25 and Kh-29 air to ground missiles along jamming pods such as SPS-141 for SAM suppression.

In October 1995, he was promoted to vice-marshal and appointed Chief of the KPA General Political Bureau and a member of the Korean Workers' Party Central Military Committee.

Most sources on the subject abstain from giving hard numbers, but all of them estimate the average annual flying hours per pilot as being 'low' to 'very low'.

Ground training, both in classrooms, on instructional airframes or in a flight simulator can only substitute for 'the real thing' to a certain degree, and the low number of modern jet trainers in the KPAF arsenal points to a very modest amount of flying time for the formation of new pilots.

Seven hundred hours of sorties is considered by the United States military as the capability to wage all-out war.