Over the last few years, Burning Man has become known as a haven for Silicon Valley tech bros and Instagram influencers who cough up thousands of dollars to party in "Mad Max" desert cosplay.
Hundreds of private planes are touching down at a makeshift airport for billionaire favorite Burning Man
27.08.2024 - 20:39 / insider.com / Jeff Bezos / Mark Zuckerberg / Elon Musk
Hundreds of charter and personal planes touched down on the same tarmac this weekend — and it wasn't in the Hamptons, Lake Tahoe, or any other particularly bougie hot spot. It was a pop-up airport called 88NV in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Officially named Black Rock City Municipal Airport, 88NV's two 6,000-foot runways created from a dry lakebed handle the hundreds of planes flying in for the annual Burning Man festival. The temporary airfield is only open for about two weeks before it's taken down "without a trace," the website says.
In the spirit of the event, 88NV is run almost completely by volunteers, including on the ramp and in the air traffic control tower.
"Burning Man hires a crew of five professional air traffic controllers who are the best in the world," a spokesperson for the Burning Man Project told Business Insider, adding that the controllers also worked large airshows such as Wisconsin's famous AirVenture Oshkosh event. "The airfield is rolled and watered every night by a small fleet of large trucks to make the surface acceptable for aircraft and reduce dust."
The spokesperson said that during Burning Man peak days, the airport handled about 500 takeoffs and landings a day. This includes charter flights, personal and private aircraft, and "scenic flights given for free to Burning Man participants." He added that most of the operations involved propeller-driven planes, but the airport would also see the occasional charter jet.
According to data from the aircraft-tracking website FlightAware, 88NV has handled more than 230 arrivals, including scenic flights, since the temporary airport opened for the season. The spike began on Sunday when the festival started, and hundreds more planes are expected before 88NV disappears again.
Among the operations is Burning Man's dedicated shuttle service called Burner Express Air, which connects cities in California and Nevada to 88NV — but it's not cheap. At the time of publishing, a roundtrip ticket starts at more than $1,500 from Reno and more than $3,000 from the Bay Area.
Burner Express Air told BI the cost of chartering one of its planes outright started at $9,000 — one way.
Burning Man wasn't always for the jet set. The annual music and arts festival started in San Francisco as a group of friends and a bonfire before moving to its desert locale, known as the Playa, in 1991.
By the mid-1990s, it was attracting the attention of those now considered the tech elite — though they weren't quite as elite then. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, and Jeff Bezos attended the festival in the 1990s.
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While a few planes started to fly into the desert in 1991, the Black Rock City airport wasn't recognized until 2008.
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