Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub N10TA flies from Redding to Cottonwood in 6 minutes

Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub, tail number N10TA, landed at Lake California Air Park (68CA) in Cottonwood on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 15:38 UTC. The aircraft departed from Redding Municipal Airport (KRDD) at 15:32 UTC, making the flight 6 minutes long. This was a short hop between two airports in Northern California.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 10 nm, or 11 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 108 knots, and the highest altitude recorded was 1,550 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 1 US gallon of fuel, producing about 9 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 22 miles. The CubCrafters XCub is a 2019 bush plane, serial CCX-2000-0080, with a top speed of about 140 knots and a range of around 800 nautical miles. It seats up to two passengers.

This was the first landing at Cottonwood by any 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, 430 nm from Cottonwood. 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. In the 30 days before this flight, all four of McCaw's aircraft made 22 flights, totaling 30.4 hours in the air. The most common destinations were Santa Barbara, with 5 landings; Victoria, with 2 landings; and Seattle, with 2 landings.

Craig McCaw, born 1949 in Centralia, Washington, 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 licenses 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. He runs Eagle River Inc. and co-chairs Pendrell. No news reports or public records link this specific flight to any business meeting, property, or event near Cottonwood.

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 Pacific Northwest and California in recent days. The XCub remains at Cottonwood as of this report.

The XCub had been on the ground at Redding for about 16 hours before Sunday's hop. Redding's longest runway is 7,003 feet at an elevation of 505 feet. Cottonwood's longest runway is 3,000 feet at 615 feet.

In the 30 days before this flight, the longest leg flown by any of McCaw's four aircraft was 4,070 nm from Farnborough, Hampshire to Abbotsford on September 30, 2026, in the Bombardier Challenger 604, tail number N222MC.

The other aircraft on file for this owner are N222MC, a Bombardier Challenger 604; N688MC, a Cessna 208 Caravan; and N1CM, a de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver.