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- Burning Man kicked off this weekend in the Nevada Desert.
- Hundreds of planes descended on the makeshift airport built for the occasion.
- The festival has become a popular destination for the ultrarich of Silicon Valley.
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 particular 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."
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, noting the controllers also work large airshows like Wisconsin's famous Oshkosh AirVenture 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 during Burning Man peak days, the airport handles about 500 takeoffs and landings per 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 involve propeller-driven planes, but the airport will 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 Air Express, which connects cities in California and Nevada to 88NV — but it's not cheap. At the time of publishing, a roundtrip ticket starts at over $1,500 from Reno and over $3,000 from the Bay Area.
Burner Air Express told BI the cost of chartering one of its planes outright starts 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 — although they weren't quite as elite then. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos attended the festival in the 1990s.
While a few planes started to fly into the desert in 1991, the Black Rock City airport wasn't recognized until 2008. By then, the festival was known as much as a gathering of anticapitalist hippies as a destination for the technorati.
Famous founders and CEOs, such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ray Dalio, have all attended the event.
As Musk told Recode in 2014: "If you haven't been, you just don't get it."
It's not just the private planes that make the Burning Man experience different for the ultrawealthy.
Rich burners buy over-the-top outfits and drive around in decked-out art cars — fancy golf carts — not bikes. Instead of sleeping in run-of-the-mill tents they pitch themselves, they spend tens of thousands of dollars to stay in fancy camps with furniture, electricity, and, in some cases, air conditioning. Rather than cook simple food, they hire private chefs to cater in the middle of the desert.
Word is still out on whether this adheres to Burning Man's 10 principles, namely decommodification, leaving no trace, and radical self-reli. Still, it sure is easier than getting stuck in the mud.