Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub N10TA flies from Corning to Orland in 15 minutes

Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub, tail number N10TA, landed at Haigh Field (KO37) in Orland, California, on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 16:02 UTC. The aircraft departed from Corning Municipal Airport (K0O4) at 15:47 UTC, making the flight 15 minutes long. This was a short hop between two airports in Northern California's Sacramento Valley.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 23 nm, or 26 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 92 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 100 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 1,450 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 2 US gallons of fuel, producing about 24 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 59 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 Orland 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, 469 nm from Orland. 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 23 flights, totaling 30.5 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, 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 $11.5B. He then took a controlling stake in Nextel in 1995, co-founded the Teledesic satellite venture with Bill Gates in 1994, built NEXTLINK/XO Communications, and founded Clearwire in 2004. He runs Eagle River Inc. and co-chairs Pendrell. No news reports or scheduled public appearances tied to McCaw were found near Orland or Corning.

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 Northern California in recent days. The XCub remains at Orland as of this report.

The CubCrafters XCub had made several hops earlier that day. It flew from Redding to Cottonwood, a 6-minute, 10-nautical-mile leg. Before that, it went from Redding to Redding in 13 minutes, covering 21 nautical miles. The day before, it flew from Eugene to Oakland in 30 minutes over 34 nautical miles, and from Renton to Eugene in 2 hours 8 minutes over 204 nautical miles.

The Bombardier Challenger 604, tail N222MC, made the longest leg among all of McCaw's aircraft in the 30 days before this flight. On September 30, 2026, it flew from Farnborough, Hampshire, to Abbotsford, a distance of 4,070 nautical miles. The Challenger also flew between Palm Springs and Santa Barbara on October 16, 17, and 19.

The de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, tail N1CM, flew from Kenmore to Renton on October 23. That flight lasted 13 minutes and covered 14 nautical miles. Haigh Field's longest runway is 4,500 feet at an elevation of 215 feet. Corning Municipal Airport's longest runway is 2,702 feet at an elevation of 292 feet.