Elon Musk's Gulfstream G650ER N628TS lands in Bakersfield after 22-minute flight from Los Angeles

Elon Musk's Gulfstream G650ER, tail N628TS, flew from Los Angeles International Airport to Meadows Field in Bakersfield on Thursday, October 29, 2026. The aircraft departed at 03:54 UTC and landed at 04:16 UTC, spending 22 minutes in the air. The great-circle distance between the two airports is 95 nautical miles, or about 109 miles.

The Gulfstream G650ER has a top speed of Mach 0.925, or 516 knots. The aircraft burns an estimated 470 US gallons of fuel per hour. The longest runway at Los Angeles International Airport is 12,894 feet. At Meadows Field, the longest runway is 10,849 feet and the elevation is 510 feet.

The flight averaged a ground speed of 256 knots and reached a top speed of 410 knots at a maximum altitude of 15,000 feet. The aircraft burned an estimated 174 US gallons of fuel, producing about 1.7 metric tons of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 4,144 miles. The Gulfstream G650ER is an ultra-long range business jet with a range of 7,500 nautical miles, a ceiling of 51,000 feet, and seating for up to 19 passengers. The flight used only 1 percent of the aircraft's range.

This was the first landing at Bakersfield in the tracking window from October 12 to October 29, 2026, for all of Elon Musk's aircraft. The home base on file for Elon Musk is Austin Bergstrom International Airport, and his usual destinations include Los Angeles, San Jose, Brownsville, West Palm Beach, Washington Dulles, and Lubbock. In the 30-day window, the owner's five Gulfstreams made 39 flights, with the most common destination being Los Angeles with eight landings. The aircraft had arrived at Los Angeles about one hour before this flight, after a 1-hour flight from Mountain View.

The most common destinations were Los Angeles with eight landings, Austin with six, and Temple with four. The longest leg in that period was a 4,716-nautical-mile flight from Luton to Los Angeles on October 16, 2026, flown by the Gulfstream G550 with tail N272BG.

Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, founder of xAI, and executive chairman of X. His net worth is estimated between $367 billion and $500 billion, and he was the world's richest person in 2024 and 2025. He lives in a roughly $50,000 home rented by SpaceX one block from Starbase in Texas. Bakersfield is about 260 miles north of Los Angeles and is near the southern end of California's Central Valley, an area where SpaceX has no publicly known facilities. (kadn.com) reported in August 2026 that one of Musk's jets visited Lafayette, Louisiana, amid talks of a SpaceX spaceport, but no similar news connects Bakersfield to a specific SpaceX event or appearance.

The distance from the home base at Austin Bergstrom International Airport to Bakersfield is 1,122 nautical miles. On October 28, 2026, the same aircraft flew from Los Angeles to Mountain View in 46 minutes, covering 277 nautical miles. Another Gulfstream, tail N450GG, flew from Matamoros to Temple on the same day in 46 minutes over 332 nautical miles.

This flight ended a short hop from Los Angeles to Bakersfield, covering a distance of 95 nautical miles.