Craig McCaw's de Havilland Beaver N1CM flies from Kenmore to Renton in 13 minutes

Craig McCaw's de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, tail number N1CM, landed at Renton Municipal Airport (KRNT) on Friday, October 23, 2026, at 20:40 UTC. The aircraft departed from Kenmore Air Harbor LLC Seaplane Base (S60) at 20:27 UTC, making the flight 13 minutes long. This was a short hop between two airports in Washington state.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 14 nm, or 17 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 65 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 111 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 450 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 7 US gallons of jet fuel, producing about 64 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 158 miles. The de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver is a 1965 radial-engined bush plane, serial 1606, with a top speed of about 140 knots and a range of around 500 nautical miles. It seats up to seven passengers.

This was the second landing at Renton by one of McCaw's aircraft in the tracked window. The previous landing was on October 6, 2026, when the Cessna 208 Caravan N688MC flew from Everett to Renton. The home base on file for McCaw's aircraft is King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle, just 4 nm from Renton. Other usual destinations include Friedman Memorial Airport in Hailey, Jackson Hole Airport, Palm Springs International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Aspen-Pitkin County Airport, and Juneau International Airport.

Craig McCaw, born 1949 in Centralia, was the second of J. Elroy McCaw's four sons and inherited a small cable system when his father died in 1969. He spent the 1980s buying cellular licences nobody else wanted and assembled them into McCaw Cellular Communications, which AT&T bought in 1994 for $11.5 billion. He later led Nextel, co-founded Teledesic with Bill Gates, and founded Clearwire. McCaw's business interests have long been based around Carillon Point in Kirkland, Washington. Renton is near his home base and is not known to be a hub for his companies. No news reports link this specific flight to any business meeting or personal event.

The aircraft is registered to Flight Management LLC in Kirkland, Washington, not to McCaw personally. The 'MC' tail numbers on his four aircraft align with that address, but no filing or news report confirms the ownership. The flight is part of a pattern of short hops in the Seattle area in recent days. The Beaver remains at Renton as of this report.

In the 30 days before this flight, all four of McCaw's aircraft made 18 flights, totaling 27.4 hours in the air. Those flights visited 12 airports in 4 countries and covered about 10,119 nautical miles. The longest leg was a 4,070-nautical-mile trip from Farnborough, Hampshire to Abbotsford on September 30, 2026, flown by the Bombardier Challenger 604, tail number N222MC.

The most common destinations for McCaw's aircraft in the tracked window were Santa Barbara, with 5 landings; Victoria, with 2 landings; and Seattle, with 2 landings. The Challenger 604 made several recent trips between Santa Barbara and Palm Springs, including a 42-minute flight on October 19 and a 43-minute flight on October 17.