Craig McCaw's Cessna Caravan N688MC flies from Boeing Field to Paine Field in 14 minutes

Craig McCaw's Cessna 208 Caravan, tail number N688MC, landed at Seattle Paine Field International Airport (KPAE) in Everett, Washington, on Monday, November 9, 2026, at 19:17 UTC. The aircraft departed from King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle at 19:04 UTC, making the flight 14 minutes long. This was a short hop between two airports in the Seattle area.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 25 nautical miles, or 29 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 112 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 196 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 1,575 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 13 US gallons of jet fuel, producing about 120 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 298 miles. The Cessna 208 Caravan is a single-engine turboprop with a fuel burn of 55 US gallons per hour.

This was the first landing at Paine Field by any of McCaw's aircraft since October 5, 2026, when the same Cessna 208 Caravan landed there. The home base on file is King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle, 23 nautical miles from Paine Field. 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 Renton since October 6, 2026, before this flight.

The Cessna 208 Caravan is a 2001 model, serial number 20800347. It is one of four aircraft registered to Flight Management LLC at a Kirkland post office box. The fleet also includes a 1996 Challenger 604, a 1965 de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, and a 2019 CubCrafters XCub. All four have valid FAA status.

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. He sat on The Nature Conservancy's global board from 2010 to 2022. His aircraft are all registered to Flight Management LLC in Kirkland, Washington, not to McCaw personally.

The flight is part of a pattern of short hops between Pacific Northwest airports for McCaw's fleet. In the 30 days before this flight, all four of his aircraft made 25 flights totaling 45.3 hours in the air and about 103,611 kg of CO2. The fleet visited 31 airports in five countries and flew about 16,178 nautical miles. The longest leg in that period was from Chicago/West Chicago to Caselle Torinese, Italy, on October 30, covering 5,340 nautical miles, flown by the Bombardier Challenger 604 N222MC.

The most common destinations were Santa Barbara, with six landings, and Victoria, with three landings. The Challenger 604 flew from Teterboro to Santa Barbara on November 8, covering 2,185 nautical miles in five hours and five minutes.