Fuelish flight on Air Kim

‘Ancient’ lift to summit

He might be able to launch missiles halfway around the world, but North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un could have a hard time making it to Singapore.

The small plane fleet that will bring Kim (inset) to meet President Trump on June 12 includes a Soviet-era jet that can’t fly more than 1,900 miles without stopping.

Singapore is 2,900 miles from North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang.

So Kim’s bulky Ilyushin-76 will have to make a pit stop, likely in a friendly country like Vietnam.

There’s also the question of jet fuel.

The plane will need around 50 metric tons of the stuff to make the flight.

That’s more jet fuel than his isolated country has imported all year.

China, its main source of fuel, sent about 3 tons in March but nothing else since the start of the year, Reuters reported.

Jet fuel is targeted by the UN sanctions on North Korean imports.

But it’s possible North Korea stockpiled jet fuel as part of its missile program.

The Ilyushin-76 is expected to bring all the essentials for a despotic head of state — limo, security equipment and maybe even a personal toilet.

Kim himself is likely to travel in an Ilyushin-62M, which also predates the fall of the USSR. Singapore is easily within range of that jet.

The Ilyushin-76 is plagued with safety problems. In a crash involving one last month, all 257 people on board were killed after takeoff from an air base in Algeria.

Kim has taken only one known overseas trip by air since coming to power in 2011 — a flight to Dalian, China, last week to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He flew in the Ilyushin-62M. Observers considered the flight a “test run” for the upcoming trip to Singapore.

In the lead-up to the summit with Trump, North Korea said Saturday foreign journalists will be able to witness the dismantling of its nuclear test site at Punggye-ri in less than two weeks.

The ceremonial dismantling will be held May 23-25, North Korean state news agency KCNA reported. Kim promised to shut down the site in a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in last month. But there was no mention of allowing foreign experts access to the site, which has hosted six tests since 2006.

Scientists previously said the site inside a mountain in the remote northern part of the country may have partially collapsed in September, after North Korea tested what it said was a hydrogen bomb.

“Thank you,” Trump tweeted about the dismantling announcement on Saturday, calling it “a very smart and gracious gesture!”

Separately, the head of the UN’s World Food Program said the country seems to be “turning a new page in history.”

David Beasley said he recently had unprecedented access to the secretive state.

He noted he didn’t see starvation on par with a famine in the 1990s, but there is “a hunger issue.”