Elon Musk's Gulfstream G650ER N628TS lands at Van Nuys after 49-minute flight from San Jose

Elon Musk's Gulfstream G650ER, tail N628TS, flew from Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport to Van Nuys Airport on Friday, November 6, 2026. The aircraft departed at 20:35 UTC and landed at 21:24 UTC, spending 49 minutes in the air. The great-circle distance between the two airports is 257 nautical miles, or about 296 miles.

The flight averaged a ground speed of 313 knots and reached a top speed of 541 knots at a maximum altitude of 31,025 feet. The aircraft burned an estimated 386 US gallons of fuel, producing about 3.7 metric tons of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 9,189 miles. The Gulfstream G650ER is an ultra long range 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 3 percent of the aircraft's range.

This was the first landing at Van Nuys in the tracking window from October 29 to November 6, 2026, for all of Elon Musk's aircraft. Austin is the home base on file for Elon Musk, and his usual destinations include Brownsville, San Jose, Los Angeles, West Palm Beach, Washington Dulles, and Lubbock. In the same 24-hour period, other tracked aircraft at Van Nuys included a Gulfstream G600 operated by Netflix, a Gulfstream G650ER operated by Disney, and a Bombardier Global 7500 operated by Dwayne Johnson.

Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, founder of xAI, and executive chairman of X. His fleet of five Gulfstreams is operated through Falcon Landing LLC. Van Nuys Airport is a common business aviation hub in the Los Angeles area, about 20 miles from SpaceX's Hawthorne headquarters and about 30 miles from Tesla's design studio in Hawthorne. A web search found no scheduled public appearances or events tied to Elon Musk or his companies near Van Nuys on this date.

The aircraft had flown from Austin to San Jose earlier on November 6, a 2-hour 58-minute flight covering 1,281 nautical miles. In the 30 days before this flight, the owner's five aircraft made 35 flights, visited 17 airports in 2 countries, and flew about 21,642 nautical miles.

The aircraft's home base, Austin Bergstrom International Airport, is 1,083 nautical miles from Van Nuys. Van Nuys Airport has a longest runway of 8,001 feet at an elevation of 802 feet. The departure airport, Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport, has a longest runway of 11,000 feet at an elevation of 62 feet.

The most common destinations in that window were Los Angeles with 10 landings, San Jose with 6 landings, and Austin with 5 landings. The longest leg in those 30 days was a Gulfstream G550 flight from Perryville to Los Angeles on October 31, covering 1,410 nautical miles.

On the same day, another of the owner's aircraft, a Gulfstream G550, flew from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 55 minutes covering 297 nautical miles, and later from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 53 minutes covering 287 nautical miles. The Gulfstream G650ER has a top speed of Mach 0.925, or 516 knots, and burns an estimated 470 US gallons of fuel per hour.