Craig McCaw's Challenger 604 N222MC flies from San Jose to Santa Barbara in 48 minutes

Craig McCaw's Bombardier Challenger 604, tail number N222MC, landed at Santa Barbara Municipal Airport (KSBA) on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, at 01:38 UTC. The aircraft departed from Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport (KSJC) at 00:50 UTC, making the flight 48 minutes long. This was a short hop between two California airports.

The great-circle distance for this leg was 203 nautical miles, or 234 miles. The aircraft's average ground speed was 254 knots, and it reached a top ground speed of 451 knots. The highest altitude recorded was 25,025 feet. Based on our estimates, the flight burned about 223 US gallons of jet fuel, producing about 2,147 kg of CO2, roughly the same as driving a car 5,313 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 seventh landing at Santa Barbara by any of McCaw's aircraft in the tracked window. The last one was on November 9, 2026, two days before this flight, also by N222MC. The home base on file is King County International Airport - Boeing Field (KBFI) in Seattle, 794 nautical miles from Santa Barbara. 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 San Jose for about 0 hours before this flight, following a 1-hour-45-minute trip from Victoria on November 10.

The aircraft used only 5 percent of its range on this flight. Santa Barbara's longest runway is 6,037 feet. San Jose's longest runway is 11,000 feet.

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 came off the Forbes 400 around 2016; the $2.8–3.0B figures that circulate for 2026 are from non-Forbes trackers and should be read as approximate. No news outlet reported a scheduled public appearance or board meeting for McCaw near Santa Barbara on this date.

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. Santa Barbara is a frequent destination for the fleet, with six landings in the 30 days before this flight.

The most common destinations were Santa Barbara with 6 landings, Victoria with 4, and Seattle with 2. The longest leg in that window was from Chicago to Caselle Torinese, Italy, on October 30, covering 5,340 nautical miles.