Craig McCaw's Challenger 604 N222MC flies from Victoria to Bellingham in 13 minutes

Craig McCaw's Bombardier Challenger 604, tail number N222MC, landed at Bellingham International Airport (KBLI) on Thursday, October 29, 2026, at 00:22 UTC. The aircraft departed from Victoria International Airport (CYYJ) at 00:09 UTC, making the flight 13 minutes long. This was a short cross-border hop between Canada and the United States.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 44 nautical miles, or 50 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 203 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 282 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 5,025 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 60 US gallons of jet fuel, producing about 578 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 1,431 miles. The Challenger 604 is a large-cabin jet with a range of 3,900 nautical miles, a ceiling of 41,000 feet, and seating for up to 12 passengers.

This was the first landing at Bellingham by any of McCaw's aircraft in the tracked window. The home base on file is King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle, 77 nautical miles from Bellingham. 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. The aircraft had been on the ground at Victoria for about 6 hours before this flight, following a 2-hour-7-minute trip from Santa Barbara on October 28.

The flight used about 1 percent of the aircraft's range. Victoria International Airport has a longest runway of 7,000 feet at an elevation of 63 feet. Bellingham International Airport's longest runway is 6,700 feet at 170 feet elevation.

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 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 between Pacific Northwest airports.

In the 30 days before this flight, all four of McCaw's aircraft made 29 flights totaling 34.7 hours in the air and about 74,201 kg of CO2. They visited 29 airports in 4 countries and flew about 11,071 nautical miles. The longest leg was from Farnborough, Hampshire to Abbotsford on September 30, 2026, covering 4,070 nautical miles.

The most common destinations for all of McCaw's aircraft in the tracked window were Santa Barbara with 5 landings, Victoria with 3, and Seattle with 2. The other aircraft on file include a Cessna 208 Caravan, a de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, and a CubCrafters XCub.