Craig McCaw

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 — the deal that created the first genuinely national American cellular carrier. 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, chairing it until the end of 2010. He runs Eagle River Inc. and co-chairs Pendrell. He sat on The Nature Conservancy's global board from 2010 to 2022. He bought Kenny G's Hunts Point estate in 1999 for a reported $20M-plus, and paid $35M for a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO in 2012. 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.

Four aircraft, all registered to Flight Management LLC at a Kirkland PO box, and the spread is the interesting part — this is not a single-jet flight department but a Pacific Northwest air fleet. N222MC is a 1996 Canadair CL-600-2B16, a Challenger 604, serial 5329, hex A1E985. N688MC is a 2001 Cessna 208 Caravan, serial 20800347, hex A92205. N1CM is a 1965 de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver, serial 1606, hex A00040 — a sixty-year-old radial-engined bush plane. N10TA is a 2019 CubCrafters XCub, serial CCX-2000-0080, hex A00405, registered under the L-Bird LLC type certificate. All four are FAA status valid.

The attribution is by address, not by name: Flight Management LLC sits in Kirkland, where McCaw's business interests have long been based around Carillon Point, and the 'MC' tails line up. No filing or news report states that Flight Management LLC is his. Note also that there are four McCaw brothers — Craig, Bruce, John Jr. and Keith, who died in 2002 — and none of these aircraft should be read onto the other three.