I was excited this year because I went from being a passenger in a small plane headed to BRC, and back, and thinking it would be cool to get my pilot's license, to getting the said license, and managing to rent a plane from the fine folks at Shoreline Flying Club at Palo Alto Airport

The flight was about 1H50 each way, although you have to add pre-flight, tying down the plane, and in my case taping every orifice in the plane to make sure playa dust wouldn't get in (playa dust is not very kind to mechanical hardware, which is why we were all surprised to see some rich folks who showed up just for 6 hours, paid $2000 cash at the gate, and flew in in a Cessna Citation Jet. That was more rich tourist spectator behaviour than in Burning Man spirit...)
Anyway, here's the gps info of the flight, and the city and you can also find more pictures from the flight from KPAO to BRC ).

The airport went over 100 planes this year


welcome home




Virtually all orifices were closed, and the wheel bearings/grease protected


If all customs agents were like this, flying wouldn't be that bad


The lovely black rock travel agency


cleaning the playa dust out of the engines in this planes must suck

A big thank you goes to all the people who made the airport possible yet again, be it setting it up and tearing it down, or manning unicom, to advise incoming pilots. You can see more of the pictures from the airport and The city seen from the sky

While I spent most of my Burning Man time outside of the airport, and in the event (you can read about it here ), but I was still able to see the formation flight that happened (7 planes flying in the shape of the man), as shown in the picture below or video of the formation flight

On the way back, even if going to the airport is a bit of a trek (thanks so much again to Ranger Fixit for the ride there), and factoring in preflight time, as well as taking all the tape and plastic wrap off the plane, it wasn't as bad as the 1.5-2H it took people to get to the road.
I heard that on Monday, the wait time spiked to 4H. Egads! I guess despite the flight planning and pre/post-flight time, this is one of the times where flying makes sense.

All right, I guess there are many rows of cars trying to get onto one small road

The flight home was uneventful for us (a few pictures here ). Luckily I was more awake than my passengers :)