Charles Simonyi's Falcon 8X N822LC flies 23 nm from Boeing Field to Paine Field

Charles Simonyi's Dassault Falcon 8X, tail number N822LC, flew from King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle to Seattle Paine Field International Airport (KPAE) in Everett on Saturday, November 7, 2026. The flight departed at 19:47 UTC and touched down at 20:07 UTC, spending just 20 minutes in the air. The great-circle distance between the two airports is 23 nautical miles, or about 26 miles.

The 23 nm leg used a small fraction of the Falcon 8X's 6,450 nm range. The aircraft reached a top ground speed of 239 knots and a highest altitude of 4,025 feet. Our estimate puts fuel burn at about 95 gallons, producing roughly 915 kg of CO2, comparable to driving a car 2,266 miles. The Falcon 8X typically seats 12 to 16 passengers, cruises at Mach 0.90, and can fly at up to 51,000 feet.

This was the first tracked landing at Paine Field for N822LC in the 30-day window before November 7. The aircraft's home base is King County International Airport (Boeing Field) in Seattle. In the previous 30 days, the jet visited six airports in one country, flying about 7,008 nm total. The longest leg in that period was a 2,066 nm trip from Ewing Township to Seattle on October 31. Another tracked aircraft, Stuart Sloan's Gulfstream G550, landed at Paine Field about 17 hours earlier.

Charles Simonyi led the teams that built Microsoft Word and Excel after bringing WYSIWYG editing with him from Xerox PARC, where he wrote Bravo. He left Microsoft in 2002 to found Intentional Software, which Microsoft bought back in 2017. He flew to the International Space Station as a spaceflight participant twice, in April 2007 and again in March 2009, the only private citizen to make the trip twice. The Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences has given to the Institute for Advanced Study, the Seattle Symphony, and the Charles Simonyi Endowment for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. N822LC is registered to Valkyrie 8X LLC of Seattle, an entity named for the aircraft type rather than the owner, a deliberate privacy pattern.

The aircraft is a Falcon 8X, serial number 492, built in 2022. The FAA master record lists it as a Falcon 7X because Dassault certified the 8X as a derivative on the 7X type certificate, but Flightradar24 and AirNav Radar both report it under the ICAO type FA8X. Valkyrie 8X LLC holds this jet the way Valkyrie 7X LLC held the Falcon 7X N786CS before it. The home base remains Boeing Field in Seattle.

In the 30 days before this flight, the aircraft made eight tracked flights totaling 17.2 hours in the air. Those flights produced an estimated 46,243 kg of CO2. The most recent prior flight was from Fairfield to Seattle on November 3, covering 562 nautical miles in 1 hour 17 minutes.