The $35-an-hour private jet

Olympic 4 is 810 square feet of plywood, white wall panels and grey airport carpeting in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. It contains two chairs, a table, a couch and a bank of lamps mounted behind cut-outs shaped like aircraft windows. It has never taxied anywhere, because it was never an aircraft. It is a fuselage-shaped room, and you can have it from $34.99 an hour.

That is the weekday rate on FD Photo Studio’s own booking page as of this writing; weekends run $39.99. The price includes three flash units, wireless triggers, paper backdrops, a make-up station and Wi-Fi. The studio describes itself as “First in Los Angeles, rental photo studio with unique Private Jet (Airplane) set and artificial window lights.”

The number is worth sitting with, because it is the whole story compressed into two decimal places. Roughly thirty-five dollars is what it costs, at the bottom of the market, to produce the single most legible symbol of wealth in the entire influencer vocabulary.

The price used to be higher, and that is the interesting part

When The Daily Beast wrote about the same set on 26 October 2020, the rate was $64 an hour. Five and a half years later the list price has fallen by nearly half. Prices in most of the photography economy have gone the other way.

The studio’s owner is Sergey Kostikov, who emigrated from Russia in the 2000s, started FD as a hobby in 2012 and formalised it as a business in 2017. He told The Daily Beast why he built a fuselage instead of buying one, and the answer is a small masterpiece of supply-chain reasoning:

“The problem with airplane graveyards is that they only sell parts that can be used. If they can be used, they’re expensive.”

He also explained what he was undercutting. Of the rental options available when he started, he said: “Everything I saw you had to pay $500 for the whole day minimum, and that was before the equipment and insurance and lights.”

So the set was not built to deceive anybody. It was built because a carpenter’s estimate came in under a salvage broker’s estimate, and because a day rate of $500 looked like a gap in the market. Everything that has happened since is downstream of a construction cost.

What the real thing costs

There is a genuine, grounded Gulfstream III in Los Angeles that rents for photo and video shoots at published tiered rates: $750 an hour for a two-hour booking, $600 an hour for four hours, $525 for six, and $425 an hour if you take it for twelve. Those are real wings, real registration, real airstairs.

Set the two side by side and the arithmetic does the argument for you. The cheapest honest hour costs roughly twelve times the cheapest dishonest one. And the dishonest one comes with lights.

A small wrinkle for the pedants: FD’s own page says the set is 810 square feet, while its Peerspace listing says 700, with a capacity of 20 people. Even the room’s dimensions come in more than one version depending on where you are reading about it.

One set became a category

Olympic 4 was the first jet set of its kind in the United States. It is no longer remotely alone. Peerspace now carries jet-interior listings in Orlando, in Yonkers, in Atlanta, and in Levallois-Perret just outside Paris — where the host has dispensed with euphemism entirely and titled the listing “Studio Influencer | Intérieur d’avion Jet Privé”.

That French listing title is the most honest piece of copywriting in this entire industry. It does not pretend the room is for aviation photography or aircraft catalogues. It names the customer.

The set has also gone mainstream inside the entertainment business it imitates. The rapper Famous Dex shot a music video on FD’s fake jet. Lil Nas X used it to make a parody. Once a prop is being used to satirise the thing it is a prop for, the prop has won.

Alongside the rooms, a full props layer has grown up. Lion Heart Lifestyle in Los Angeles maintains a page headed “Models & Influencers” offering exotic cars, luxury yachts and private jets “for aerial shots”, promising to “elevate your photoshoots” across Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Malibu. It publishes no rates at all. Pricing is by enquiry only — which tells you something about who is expected to ask.

The correction nobody printed

Here is the part of the story that ought to be uncomfortable for anyone in our line of work, this publication included.

Around 2017, the internet discovered Moscow’s Private Jet Studio, which charged Ru14,000 — roughly $220 — for two hours with a photographer, or Ru11,000 without one. The coverage was gleeful. The framing, repeated across outlet after outlet, was that Russian influencers were renting time inside a parked Gulfstream G650 to fake a lifestyle.

Corporate Jet Investor went and looked. Its finding was that most of the press coverage was itself inaccurate. The venue is a studio mock-up on a Moscow industrial estate, not a parked G650. The interior is a hybrid built from the design language of several different aircraft. The window shapes do not match a G650 at all.

So the story ran roughly as follows. Influencers staged a photograph. Media organisations reported on the staging without checking the underlying object. The reporting was wrong about what the object was. And the corrected version — that the aircraft was never an aircraft either — is materially funnier and more useful than the version that went viral.

Being wrong about a fake is not obviously better than being fooled by it. It is worth keeping that in mind before writing the word “exposed”.

When the aircraft is real and the flight is not

The mock-up studio is only one production method. Another is to use an actual aeroplane that is not going anywhere.

In July 2023, a group of influencers promoting wealth-building schemes in Malaysia filmed themselves boarding a Bombardier Challenger 601-3R, registration N888FJ, and fanning cash inside the cabin. TikTok users unpicked it within days. Accounts including a pilot posting as @mrturboprop and a user called @user_error2021 checked the registration against flight records and established that the aircraft had not flown since February 2023. It was a grounded prop with a tail number.

That case is confirmed by aircraft registration and flight-record checks reported in the aviation trade press, which makes it unusually solid. Flight data is one of the few things in this beat that is genuinely hard to argue with.

The only celebrity who said it out loud

In May 2017 the rapper Bow Wow posted an image of a private jet in a way that implied he was flying on it. A passenger on his actual commercial flight posted a photograph of him in the cabin. The #BowWowChallenge followed, and for a week the internet posted pictures of itself next to things it did not own.

Eight years later, on Club Shay Shay with Shannon Sharpe, he addressed it directly. In remarks reported on 3 May 2025 he said: “I got caught, simple as that. I was fake flexing.”

He added detail. The image, he said, was a stock photo from a Florida charter company, FLL VIP Trans. He also offered a second motive alongside the first: “I don’t want people to know how I’m moving. And I posted it to derail people.”

Both things can be true. What matters is that it remains the cleanest on-record admission available — a named person confirming a staged image in their own words, without a lawsuit forcing it.

What the $35 actually buys

A commenter quoted in The Daily Beast’s piece, posting as @maisonmelissa, put the consequence better than most media critics manage:

“It’s crazy that anything you’re looking at could be fake. The setting, the clothes, the body… idk it just kinda of shakes my reality a bit lol.”

That is the actual product. Not the photograph — the doubt. Once a fuselage-shaped room costs less per hour than a decent dinner, no single jet photograph can carry any information about anyone’s wealth, including the photographs of people who really did charter the aircraft.

The studios are not doing anything wrong. They rent rooms and say plainly what the rooms are. The set is legal, advertised, searchable and cheap. Nobody is hiding it; there is a booking page.

The mechanism worth understanding is simply this: the cost of manufacturing a status signal has fallen far faster than the audience’s ability to price it. Thirty-five dollars an hour, three flash units and a make-up station, and the most exclusive image in the culture is available to anyone who can drive to Boyle Heights.

Sources

1. The Daily Beast on FD Photo Studio's jet set and $64/hr rate (26 October 2020)
2. FD Photo Studio's own Olympic 4 listing and current rates
3. The same set listed on Peerspace, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
4. Peerspace jet-interior listing, Orlando FL
5. Peerspace jet-interior listing, Yonkers NY
6. Peerspace listing titled Studio Influencer - Interieur d'avion Jet Prive, Levallois-Perret
7. Published photo/video shoot rates for a real grounded Gulfstream III in Los Angeles
8. Corporate Jet Investor's correction to the Moscow 'fake jet' coverage
9. Bow Wow's on-record admission on Club Shay Shay (reported 3 May 2025)
10. CNN on the 2017 #BowWowChallenge
11. AeroTime on the grounded Bombardier N888FJ influencer shoot, Malaysia, July 2023
12. Lion Heart Lifestyle's 'Models & Influencers' props page