(LEAD) N. Korean airliner arrives in Beijing in 1st post-COVID-19 commercial flight

(ATTN: UPDATES with details throughout)

BEIJING, Aug. 22 (Yonhap) -- A flight operated by Air Koryo, North Korea's national carrier, arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, marking the resumption of commercial flights connecting the two countries after a hiatus of more than 3 1/2 years caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The JS151 flight, which departed from Sunan International Airport in Pyongyang, arrived at Beijing Capital International Airport at 9:17 a.m., earlier than its estimated time of arrival of 9:50 a.m.

An arrival and departure board at the airport showed that the flight had arrived in Beijing and that a JS152 flight was scheduled to depart for Pyongyang at 1:05 p.m.

The flight had departed from Pyongyang at 8:30 a.m., according to real-time flight tracking service Flightradar24.

The arrival came a day after two Air Koryo flights that were scheduled to arrive in Beijing at 9:30 a.m. and depart at 1:05 p.m. were abruptly canceled.

Meanwhile, the check-in counter of Air Koryo at the Beijing airport was bustling with North Korean passengers ahead of the afternoon flight heading to Pyongyang.

Many of the passengers, who were wearing North Korean flag pins on their chests, had trolleys full of baggage in a sign of the long hiatus that had suspended international flights from and to the North since January 2020.

It wasn't immediately clear how many passengers boarded the Tu-204 aircraft scheduled to head to Pyongyang. The plane, made by the Russian aerospace company Tupolev, has a seating capacity of 160-190 depending on the variant.

The Tu-204, the latest among the fleet owned by Air Koryo, had served routes connecting North Korea and China ahead of the pandemic.

The two flights came days after a team of North Korean athletes made a rare trip across the border on a bus traveling from the North Korean border city of Sinuiju into China to attend a taekwondo event in Kazakhstan.

The rare border crossing was seen as a sign of Pyongyang's border reopening after the secretive regime closed its border with China due to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

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