Craig McCaw's Challenger 604 N222MC flies from Bellingham to Chicago in 2 hours 2 minutes

Craig McCaw's Bombardier Challenger 604, tail number N222MC, landed at Dupage Airport (KDPA) in Chicago/West Chicago on Thursday, October 29, 2026, at 02:49 UTC. The aircraft departed from Bellingham International Airport (KBLI) at 00:47 UTC. The flight took 2 hours and 2 minutes to cover the distance between the two airports.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 871 nm, or 1,003 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 428 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 474 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 31,025 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 571 US gallons of jet fuel, producing about 5,480 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 13,565 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 Dupage 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, 1,479 nm from Dupage. 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 30 flights, totaling 34.9 hours in the air. The most common destinations were Santa Barbara, with 5 landings; Victoria, with 3 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 link this specific flight to any business meeting or personal event near Dupage Airport.

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 cross-country trips in recent days. The Challenger 604 arrived at Dupage just before 03:00 UTC, completing a routine hop from Bellingham.

The Challenger 604 used 22 percent of its range on this leg. Dupage Airport's longest runway is 7,571 feet at an elevation of 759 feet. Bellingham International Airport's longest runway is 6,700 feet at 170 feet elevation.

The longest leg in that window was a 4,070 nm flight from Farnborough, Hampshire to Abbotsford on September 30, 2026, flown by N222MC. Before departing Bellingham, the aircraft had spent about 0 hours on the ground after arriving from Victoria in a 13-minute, 44 nm hop.

McCaw's fleet includes a 2001 Cessna 208 Caravan, a 1965 de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, and a 2019 CubCrafters XCub. The Beaver is a sixty-year-old radial-engined bush plane. The XCub is registered under the L-Bird LLC type certificate. All four aircraft are FAA status valid.