Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub N10TA flies from Stockton to Merced in 38 minutes

Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub, tail number N10TA, landed at Merced Regional Macready Field (KMCE) on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 18:53 UTC. The aircraft departed from Stockton Metropolitan Airport (KSCK) at 18:15 UTC, making the flight 38 minutes long. This was a short hop between two airports in California's Central Valley.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 48 nm, or 55 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 75 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 94 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 3,625 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 6 US gallons of fuel, producing about 61 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 151 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.

The aircraft had been on the ground for about one hour before this leg, following a previous tracked landing at Stockton. Earlier that day, the same CubCrafters flew from Maxwell to Stockton in 1 hour 3 minutes, covering 96 nm. It also made short hops from Corning to Orland and from Redding to Cottonwood, each lasting under 20 minutes.

This was the first landing at Merced 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, 620 nm from Merced. 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 25 flights, totaling 31.8 hours in the air. The most common destinations were Santa Barbara, with 5 landings; Victoria, with 2 landings; and Seattle, with 2 landings.

The departure field at Stockton has a longest runway of 10,245 feet and sits at an elevation of 33 feet. Merced's longest runway is 5,914 feet, with an elevation of 155 feet. In the 30 days before this flight, the longest leg among all of McCaw's aircraft was a 4,070 nm trip from Farnborough, Hampshire to Abbotsford on September 30, flown by the Challenger 604.

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 public schedules link this flight to any business meeting or personal event near Merced.

The CubCrafters XCub is registered under the L-Bird LLC type certificate. The aircraft remains at Merced as of this report.