Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub N10TA flies from Bridge Bay to Redding in 13 minutes

Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub, tail number N10TA, landed at Redding Municipal Airport (KRDD) on Saturday, October 24, 2026, at 23:10 UTC. The aircraft departed from Bridge Bay Resort Seaplane Base (H77) in Redding at 22:57 UTC, making the flight 13 minutes long. This was a short hop between two airports in California.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 21 nm, or 24 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 98 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 123 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 4,775 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 2 US gallons of fuel, producing about 21 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 51 miles. The CubCrafters XCub is a 2019 light bush plane, serial CCX-2000-0080, with a top speed of about 140 knots and a range of around 500 nautical miles. It seats up to two passengers.

This was the first landing at Redding by one of McCaw's aircraft in the tracked window. The home base on file for McCaw's aircraft is King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle, 421 nm from Redding. 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. Recent flights by N10TA included a 30-minute hop from Eugene to Oakland earlier on October 24, and a 2-hour 8-minute flight from Renton to Eugene the same day.

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. Redding is not known to be a hub for his companies, and 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 California in recent days. The CubCrafters XCub remains at Redding as of this report.

In the 30 days before this flight, all four of McCaw's tracked aircraft flew 21 flights totaling 30.2 hours in the air. Those flights covered about 10,371 nautical miles and produced an estimated 72,882 kg of CO2. 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 destination for all of McCaw's aircraft in that window was Santa Barbara, with five landings. Victoria and Seattle each saw two landings. The fleet used 15 airports in four countries. Recent flights by the Challenger 604 included a 42-minute hop from Palm Springs to Santa Barbara on October 19 and a 43-minute return on October 17.