Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub N10TA lands in Madera after 3-minute flight

Craig McCaw's CubCrafters XCub, tail number N10TA, landed at El Peco Ranch Airport (49CL) in Madera, California, on Sunday, October 25, 2026, at 19:13 UTC. The aircraft departed from O'Flanagan Airport (US-5872) in Chowchilla at 19:10 UTC, making the flight 3 minutes long. This was a short hop between two small airports in California's Central Valley.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 6 nm, or 7 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was not recorded, but it reached a top ground speed of 95 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 3,325 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 0 US gallons of fuel, producing about 4 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 11 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 Madera 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, 645 nm from Madera. 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 26 flights, totaling 32.5 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 $11.5 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 link this specific flight to any business meeting or personal event near Madera or Chowchilla. 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 XCub remains at El Peco Ranch Airport as of this report.

El Peco Ranch Airport has a longest runway of 3,000 feet and sits at an elevation of 213 feet. O'Flanagan Airport is at 154 feet. The XCub had landed at Merced earlier that day before the short hop to Chowchilla.

In the 30 days before this flight, the longest leg flown by any of McCaw's aircraft was 4,070 nm from Farnborough, Hampshire to Abbotsford on September 30, 2026, in the Bombardier Challenger 604, tail number N222MC. That aircraft is a 1996 model, serial 5329.

The XCub made several other short flights on October 25, including Stockton to Merced, Corning to Orland, and Redding to Cottonwood. On October 24, it flew from Eugene to Oakland and from Renton to Eugene. The de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, tail number N1CM, flew from Kenmore to Renton on October 23.