Phil Knight takes the world's shortest flight, back home to Hillsboro

Phil Knight departed from Portland Hillsboro Airport (KHIO) at 10:30 AM on June 5, 2026, and landed back at the same airport just nine minutes later, having climbed no higher than 2,000 feet. The brief sortie, in his Gulfstream G500 (N19HT), was a local training flight — a crew familiarization hop around the Pacific Northwest, as noted in a photo caption on X from Russell Hill, who spotted the aircraft practicing approaches [stk.st/n19ht](https://stk.st/n19ht).

Nothing newsworthy pulled Knight away from Oregon this week; the flight was purely operational. Hillsboro Airport, home to both Knight's personal hangar and Nike's corporate flight department, is the quiet executive airfield from which the Knight family's two Gulfstreams — N1KE and N19HT — operate [wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland-Hillsboro_Airport](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland-Hillsboro_Airport). Per the airport's history, Knight built his private hangar there in 2014, adjacent to Nike's own facility.

The recent flight history for N19HT shows a pattern of similar short training hops and regular trips to Roberts Field in Redmond, Oregon, suggesting Knight remains close to home, with the occasional desert getaway. A flight from Hillsboro to Los Angeles on May 20, 2026, via Nike's corporate G650 (N6453) may have served a business purpose, but this week, the story is simply a billionaire taking his plane for a spin.