Introduction
Airfields and taxiways might seem like unconventional festival venues, but they offer vast, open spaces that festival producers around the world have successfully transformed into memorable event grounds. From decommissioned airports in bustling cities to remote desert airstrips, these wide-open sites come with major advantages – huge capacity, flat terrain for staging, and robust surfaces built for heavy aircraft that can support stages and crowds. However, hosting a festival on a runway or taxiway also brings unique challenges. Organizers must protect delicate tarmac from heavy equipment wear, combat dust kicked up from open ground, ensure adequate lighting (sometimes using actual runway beacons) for nighttime safety, and plan utilities like fuel and power on sites often far from city infrastructure. This case study dives into 5 festivals held on airfields across different countries, examining how each festival organizer tackled runway wear, dust mitigation, night lighting, site layout, and fuel logistics. The successes – and stumbles – of these events provide practical lessons for any festival organizer considering taking their event to the tarmac.
Runway Wear and Tear: Protecting the Tarmac
Airfield runways are engineered to handle the weight and speed of airplanes, but festival activities can still cause damage if not managed carefully. A key concern is runway wear – heavy staging, scaffolding, and vehicular traffic can stress the pavement or puncture it if not properly mitigated. For example, at a major dance festival held on the abandoned airstrip of Long Marston Airfield in the UK, over 50,000 attendees danced on former runways in 30°C heat (www.vice.com). The tarmac withstood the load, but organizers noted how the flat, unshaded asphalt turned the venue into a “carpark-like” environment, absorbing heat and offering little comfort. To protect the surface and improve the atmosphere, festival producers should take steps such as installing temporary flooring or ground mats under high-traffic areas (especially around stages and entranceways). This prevents eroding the runway’s top layer and also shields attendees from standing directly on hot asphalt.
At Germany’s historic Tempelhof Airport in Berlin – repurposed as an event park – festivals like Lollapalooza Berlin and Tempelhof Sounds have leveraged the expansive concrete runways for crowds of 20–30,000. The hardened surfaces easily supported massive stages and tens of thousands of fans without sinking in mud. However, to avoid any lasting damage, production crews at Tempelhof were careful not to drill or stake into the pavement. Instead, they used ballast weights and water-filled barriers to anchor tents and sound towers, preserving the WWII-era tarmac. After each event, a thorough inspection was done to check for any surface damage or spillages (such as fuel or oil leaks from generators) that might degrade the runway. In contracts, venue owners often require festivals to budget for potential repairs or cleaning – another reason to minimize impact.
Even grass airstrips can suffer if overloaded. A smaller boutique festival on a rural airfield might have a grass or dirt runway carefully maintained for small planes. Allowing trucks and thousands of feet on it, especially in wet conditions, can churn the ground into ruts. Festival teams have learned to reinforce grassy runways by laying down temporary roadway mats for heavy vehicles or by rerouting all non-essential traffic off the actual landing strip. For instance, some airfield events set aside the runway itself as a protected “spine” – kept clear or only used for pedestrian space – while directing trucks along the edges or taxiways that can be sacrificed if needed. Event organizers should also consider season and weather: one rainy day can soften an airfield surface dramatically. If rain is likely, it’s wise to halt heavy vehicle movement to preserve the ground until it’s drier or add gravel to critical routes. Ultimately, treating the runway with respect – as a key asset that must be handed back in good condition – is paramount. A damaged runway not only risks the event’s relationship with the venue, it can also pose safety hazards if the airfield returns to aviation use.
Dust Mitigation on Open Fields
Dust is a notorious challenge at many outdoor festivals, but airfields and open deserts can be especially prone to dusty conditions. With little vegetation or obstructions, wind and human activity can kick up clouds of fine particles – affecting visibility, equipment, and attendee comfort. Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert is a prime example of extreme dust: the festival’s temporary city is built on a dry lakebed with powder-fine playa dust. During the event, sudden dust storms can sweep through, coating stages and choking the air. Organizers combat this by enforcing a low speed limit for vehicles (to reduce dust clouds) and by encouraging participants to wear goggles and masks. In fact, dust is such an accepted part of Burning Man’s culture that experienced attendees bring bandanas and dust goggles as essential gear. While dust cannot be eliminated there, the festival’s production team works on mitigation: watering down busy intersections and airport runways when possible, and scheduling heavy art car movement for times when crowds are not concentrated in those areas. In one particularly dry year, Burning Man crews had to smooth and water the temporary runway repeatedly just to keep it operable for small planes (burningman.org) – illustrating how critical dust control is to basic logistics.
In more conventional airfield festivals, dust issues still arise, especially on older or unpaved surfaces. The Global Gathering festival in the UK, for instance, faced an unusual heat wave one year which dried out the surrounding ground. While the main dance areas were on tarmac, parking lots and camping zones on adjacent fields turned dusty. Organizers deployed water trucks to dampen dirt roads each morning and before peak arrival times. This simple step kept dust down so it wouldn’t drift into the stages or vendor areas. Over in Australia, the Big Red Bash – a music festival on the edge of the Simpson Desert – usually contends with red outback dust. Attendees driving in on dirt tracks can create a brown haze on the horizon. Festival organizers prepare by stationing water tankers at the site to wet down the concert area if winds pick up. Surprisingly, in 2022 and 2023 the Big Red Bash saw heavy rains instead, which turned the dust to mud (www.abc.net.au) – a reminder that you need contingencies for both extremes. Whether it’s dust or mud, the lesson is clear: monitor ground conditions constantly. Proactive measures like watering, laying straw or wood chips on high-traffic paths, and providing dust masks to staff can make a huge difference in comfort and safety. Additionally, positioning stages and tents upwind of parking or roadways can minimize how much dust blows into audience areas. For any airfield event, having a dust mitigation plan (and budget for it) is as important as the sound and lighting plans.
Nighttime Beacons and Lighting
Airfields are built for navigation – and festival organizers have found creative ways to utilize (or supplement) aviation lighting systems to keep their events safe after dark. Large open airfield sites can get extremely dark at night, with few built-in reference points once the sun sets. Good lighting design is crucial not only for the stages but for attendee movement, emergency response, and aircraft safety if any aviation operations continue. One approach is to repurpose existing runway lights or beacons. For example, at some airport-based festivals the organizers coordinate with airport authorities to use the permanent runway edge lights or apron floodlights to illuminate key pathways. In an active airfield, standard procedure is to mark closed runways with big “X” signs and disable any lights that might confuse pilots overhead. Instead, temporary lighting is set up to meet festival needs.
A memorable case of innovative beacon usage comes from Burning Man’s makeshift airport. During a special skydiving performance at night, the organizers lined the makeshift runway with temporary beacons and lights so that the pilot and jumpers could safely orient themselves (burningman.org). This not only ensured the small planes could land after dark, but it also created a unique visual spectacle for festival-goers – the sight of a runway glowing in the desert night. Many festivals on airfields will deploy light towers and LED beacons around the perimeter of the site. These serve a dual purpose: guiding attendees along safe routes (much like runway lights guide planes) and acting as warning markers to keep people away from off-limits zones (such as the airfield’s remaining active areas or hazardous equipment). At a large EDM festival on a Saudi Arabian desert airfield, the production team installed towering LED pillars that mimicked airport beacons – helping the crowd navigate while adding to the futuristic aesthetic of the event.
For smaller airfield events, simple solutions often suffice: strings of solar-powered lights along walkways, illuminated balloons or kites as markers, and generator-powered floodlights in parking areas. The key is to avoid dark “dead zones” where people could trip or get disoriented. Open expanses with few landmarks can be confusing at night, especially if attendees have been enjoying the festival spirits. Smart grid planning ties into lighting as well – dividing the site into well-lit sections that are color-coded or distinctly marked helps everyone remember locations (“meet me by the blue tower light at the old control tower”). One challenge is balancing safety lighting with the festival atmosphere. Organizers avoid stark floodlighting that kills the vibe; instead, techniques like downward-directed lights, colored LEDs, and pulsating beacons can maintain an immersive atmosphere while still providing visibility. Ultimately, lighting at an airfield festival goes beyond the stage – it’s about creating navigational beacons for humans. Just as runway lights prevent accidents in aviation, good festival lighting design prevents injuries and lost guests in the crowd.
Site Layout and Grid Planning
When faced with a wide-open airfield, festival planners essentially have a blank slate to design their event layout. This is both exciting and daunting – you have the freedom to build a mini-city or theme park from scratch, but you must impose order on the void so that everything is accessible and functional. Successful airfield festivals employ rigorous grid planning to map out stages, vendor villages, camping, parking, and emergency lanes. Often, they will use the existing runway and taxiway configuration as a guiding grid. For instance, the Airfield Festival in Romania (held at Aerodromul M?gura near Sibiu) divided its 40-hectare airfield into zones aligned with the runways: one zone for music stages (including a hangar stage utilizing an aircraft hangar structure), another for extreme sports like skateboarding and BMX, and others for camping and recreation. By using the straight lines of the tarmac as natural dividers, they made navigation intuitive – attendees could literally say “meet at the end of runway 2 by the food court.”
Similarly, Burning Man’s Black Rock City is famously organized in a semi-circular grid (like a clock face) with radial and concentric “streets” – a necessity when 70,000+ people camp in a featureless desert. Every block and intersection is planned in advance on a map. While most festivals won’t need such a complex design, the principle holds: on an open field, you must create a sense of place with a clear map and signage. Festival producers recommend marking out the site weeks ahead using flags, cones, or temporary paint on the ground. At Tempelhof Airport events, crews have painted temporary grid lines on the apron to delineate vendor booths and exhibition zones during festivals, effectively turning part of the apron into a giant grid of city blocks. This approach made it easier to allocate space and provide precise directions (each booth or camp got a “grid address”).
Emergency access is another vital aspect of layout. Airfields typically have perimeter roads or taxiways that can serve as fire lanes and medical access routes. Incorporating those into the grid plan – and keeping them clear – is lifesaving. Many airfield festivals, large and small, maintain one former taxiway as a dedicated service road running the length of the site. Security and staff vehicles use this to move around quickly, just like an artery through the event. The audience may not even realize that road is off-limits and solely for emergency or production use, but it ensures that even with tens of thousands on-site, an ambulance can reach any point in minutes. When planning the layout, organizers also consider noise and crowd flow in the wide-open space. Without natural sound breaks, stages need to be spaced far apart or oriented properly to avoid sound bleed. At the UK’s airfield festivals like Phoenix and Global Gathering, organizers learned to place stages at a good distance and often used speaker line-array technology to control sound direction on the flat terrain. Finally, don’t forget amenities in the grid: shade tents, water stations, and information towers every few hundred meters help break up the monotony of an open field and provide reference points. The goal is a site plan that feels logical, evenly utilized (to prevent crowd bottlenecks in just one area), and that leverages the airfield’s existing layout instead of fighting against it.
Fuel and Power Logistics
Hosting a festival on an airfield often means working “off the grid” in terms of power and utilities. Many airfields, especially inactive or remote ones, lack the electrical supply to run stages, lights, sound systems, and food vendors. This requires festival producers to bring in portable generators and set up extensive fuel logistics. Powering a large festival can burn through thousands of liters of diesel over a weekend, so planning fuel delivery, storage, and redundancy is critical. At remote desert festivals like Burning Man and Big Red Bash, organizers coordinate fuel deliveries via tanker trucks that travel long distances. These trucks must arrive on schedule (sometimes escorted to ensure they don’t get lost on unmarked desert roads) and are stationed in a secure “fuel farm” area on-site. Only trained technicians are allowed in this zone to refuel the generators every few hours. Safety protocols are stringent – fuel is stored with secondary containment (spill berms) and fire extinguishers on hand, given the fire risk of fueling in hot, open environments. In one instance, a fuel shortage at a desert event almost caused a main stage to go dark; since then, organizers learned to always keep a reserve supply and even have a backup generator available.
For airfield festivals in more developed areas, sometimes tapping into the grid is possible. Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, for example, still had infrastructure that allowed festivals to draw power from the city’s electrical grid with proper permits. This significantly reduced the need for generators and the carbon footprint of the event. Where grid power isn’t available, some innovative approaches have emerged: hybrid power systems (combining diesel generators with battery storage and even portable solar units) are increasingly used to cut down fuel use. Festival organizers have reported success using solar-powered tower lights for perimeter lighting, saving fuel for critical systems like stages and refrigeration.
Fuel logistics also extend to vehicles and special effects. Many airfield festivals deploy fleets of ATVs, trucks, and generators across the site – all of which need fuel. A good practice from large events is to have a small fleet of fuel golf carts or trucks that do regular rounds topping up generators so that individual teams (sound, video, vendors) don’t have to manage it themselves. Communication is key: each generator might have a tag indicating when it was last refueled and the schedule for the next refill, so nothing is forgotten. Additionally, in festivals where aviation is part of the attraction (like hot air balloons or skydiving at an airfield festival), you may even need aviation fuel (AvGas) on hand. This complicates logistics because AvGas or jet fuel must be kept separate and handled by licensed personnel. For example, at the Airfield Festival in Romania, the inclusion of recreational small plane flights for attendees meant coordinating with a local aeroclub to manage aviation fuel and refueling operations away from the main festival crowd.
Finally, budget for fuel properly. Fuel prices can fluctuate, and remote delivery costs can be high. Seasoned festival producers advise over-estimating fuel needs and setting aside contingency funds. Any unused fuel can often be returned or used for future events, but a power failure due to fuel running out will severely damage the festival’s reputation. In recent years, sustainability is a consideration too – some festivals look to reduce generator use by employing LED lighting, schedule power downs during off-peak hours, or even using biofuels. On an airfield, with typically minimal noise restrictions compared to urban venues, generators can run 24/7 if needed – but just because you can doesn’t mean you should if there are smarter energy management options. Balancing reliable power with efficient fuel use is a logistics art form that every airfield festival will refine over time.
Key Takeaways
- Preserve the Runway: Always protect the runway/taxiway surfaces. Use temporary flooring or weights instead of stakes to avoid damage, and plan for post-event inspections and repairs. A well-maintained runway ensures goodwill with the venue and safety for future use.
- Dust and Ground Conditions: Have a dust control plan. Utilize water trucks, ground cover (straw, mats), and traffic management to minimize dust in dry conditions. Conversely, prepare for mud if rain strikes – reinforce critical paths and be ready to adjust vehicle movements.
- Lighting and Beacons: Adequate lighting is essential on large dark airfields. Repurpose airport lights or deploy your own towers and LED beacons to guide attendees at night. Mark important routes and hazards, and coordinate with aviation authorities to avoid any confusion with real aircraft navigation.
- Smart Layout: Treat the site like a grid. Leverage existing runway layouts to organize stages, vendors, and camping in a logical manner. Clearly marked zones, maps, and signage will help attendees orient themselves. Always keep emergency access lanes clear (e.g., along a taxiway) for fast response across the spacious grounds.
- Fuel Management: If the site lacks grid power, plan a robust fuel and power strategy. Secure reliable generator rentals and schedule fuel deliveries with a safety margin. Create a dedicated fuel storage and refueling area following fire safety protocols. Consider hybrid power solutions to save fuel and reduce noise.
- Adapt to Scale: Tailor your logistics to the festival’s scale. Small local airfield events might get by with fewer amenities, but large festivals need professional systems for everything – from massive lighting rigs to onsite fuel teams. Scale up your infrastructure as attendance grows, and learn from each year’s challenges.
- Community and Compliance: Engage with local aviation communities and authorities early. File for any airport closure notices or airspace restrictions if needed, especially if you’ll have drones, lasers, or any aircraft at the event. Ensuring compliance keeps everyone safe and avoids last-minute legal hurdles.
- Experience Matters: Finally, draw lessons from those who’ve done it. Each airfield festival case – from desert gatherings to urban tarmac concerts – teaches that meticulous planning and creative problem-solving can turn an empty runway into a thriving festival. With the right preparation, festivals on airfields can truly take flight, offering audiences a unique experience while keeping operations grounded in solid logistics.
25th August 2025