Air Travel Sucks. It Doesn’t Have To.

I’ve been obsessed with aircraft since I was a kid. I finally started flying them myself in the late ’80s, soon after I immigrated from South Africa to Canada, and I earned my private pilot’s licence in 1990. Over the years I’ve owned several planes, including a two-seater Van’s RV-14 that I built myself from a kit. Most weekends, I’m in the air with friends. We’ll pick a small airport somewhere in Ontario or Quebec, fly an hour out, have lunch at the diner nearby and fly home. Pilots call that kind of trip the “hundred-dollar hamburger.” A few times a year, I fly my family and our dog, Jet, down to Florida and back.

By day, I’m an entrepreneur. My background is in software engineering, and in 1990 I invented WinFax: a program that let you send a fax directly from your PC, which was revolutionary at the time. It sold millions of copies and eventually shipped in a bundle with PCs around the world. A few other companies followed: I co-founded the software company Lanacom, which was later acquired by internet delivery platform BackWeb, and Delano Technology, which went public with the industry’s first email application server. My last company, Jewlr, brought made-to-order, direct-to-consumer manufacturing to the jewellery industry. I sold it in 2022. The common thread across everything I’ve built is the same: take something traditional and slow, and use technology to make it dramatically better.

Naturally, as a technologist and aviation enthusiast, I became frustrated with the lack of innovation in air travel. The commercial airline industry hasn’t evolved meaningfully in a long time. I’ve flown over a million miles on major airlines, and even with that status, I feel the pain of flying commercial. Best case scenario, you’re arriving two hours before takeoff to deal with security and boarding procedures. Commercial airlines operate using a hub-and-spoke model, where jets fly primarily between major city hubs, so you also have to account for urban congestion when commuting to and from the airport. Once you factor in potential holdups, travelling a short distance can become a full-day event. In 2023, 33.4 per cent of passenger flights in Canada were delayed. And since then, the backlog of passenger complaints to the Canadian Transportation Agency has nearly doubled. The alternative to flying commercial is flying private, but chartered flights cost tens of thousands and are designed for the ultra-wealthy. Neither option makes sense for the average business traveller—one is time-intensive, and the other cost-prohibitive.

When I sold Jewlr, I was eyeing the evolution of a new technology: eVTOL, which stands for “electric vertical take-off and landing.” These battery-powered aircraft are optimized for travelling short distances—between 20 and 500 kilometres—in urban environments. They’re small, built for one to six passengers, and they don’t require a runway. Instead, they can take off and land vertically from a small vertiport like a helipad. They’re highly futuristic—like something out of The Jetsons. In China and the UAE, the technology could be available to paying customers as early as this year, and in the U.S., the Federal Aviation Agency is beginning operations on an eVTOL pilot program this summer. But in Canada, it’s still going to take several years for these aircraft to become certified and commercially available. I don’t like waiting around for things, so I decided to get started on the future of air mobility myself.

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In 2024, I founded NectAir, a company that offers air taxi services across North America. Air taxis are on-demand private flights for short-distance travel—up to two hours non-stop. They’re convenient and flexible without asking the big bucks of charter flights, and they’re already being used in certain contexts. It’s common in the Caribbean for older, lower-cost charter planes to hop between islands, and here in Canada, an air taxi–like service is the only way to travel to certain destinations in the North. But NectAir is offering air taxis in a new context. Our customers are usually people who would otherwise fly business class. In the long term, we’re building the company with eVTOLs in mind, but for now we’re flying modern turboprops: the Piper M700 Fury, which is essentially a jet engine with a propeller. These are the sports cars of planes—fast, safe and small, perfect for same-day business trips. They seat up to four people and can access both major airports and small regional airstrips, which commercial airlines and private jets can’t serve.

Booking a charter flight can be convoluted and time-consuming, and brokers often gatekeep the process. But people can contact NectAir a few days, or even hours, before they need to take off. And unlike commercial airlines, passengers don’t have to arrive hours before the flight to trudge through security and customs lines, nor do they have to worry about logistical delays or cancellations. Instead, they can arrive 10 minutes before departure. When they land, customs officers can come right up to the aircraft.

We want people to understand that it’s possible—air travel can be enjoyable. We’re saving them hours of headache at a comparable price point with added flexibility. They can get to their destination at a reasonable cost, in a reasonable amount of time. Flying can be as easy as calling a cab.

In one instance, we received a call from an actress stuck in New York during a snowstorm. The major airlines had cancelled flights, but she urgently needed to get to Toronto for a film shoot. We were able to get her there in hours. Another time, a CEO in Toronto needed to get to a last-minute meeting in Sudbury at 6 p.m. and be back in Toronto for work the next morning. He called us that day, and we got him to his meeting in time, then back to Toronto by 10 p.m. the same evening. That’s often how it is: our passengers might only need to be on the ground for a couple hours, usually for business meetings. We had another passenger in a similar situation, and we were able to land at a small airport that was only a 10-minute drive from his destination. Had he flown commercial, it would have taken him an hour to commute there from the closest major airport. 

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When clients book an air taxi, they pay for the entire plane and split the cost between the passengers. We charge a fraction of the cost of a traditional charter flight and only marginally more than a business-class ticket on a commercial flight. A NectAir flight from Toronto to Montreal, for example, might cost $3,500 per leg, which passengers could split four ways. A same-week business-class ticket would be over $1,000 per person each way, whereas the price tag for a chartered round trip from Toronto to Montreal could run upwards of $15,000. 

NectAir is regulated through Transport Canada just like the major airlines and, by the end of this month, we’ll have three planes in the air. We’ll soon have a larger eight-seater plane, a Pilatus PC-12, with increased baggage capacity and a bathroom on board. But ultimately, our platform isn’t built around our planes. Canada will probably be a few years behind the U.S., but the use of eVTOLs for passengers is on the horizon, and we look forward to integrating them into our fleet. Since eVTOLs don’t require runways, their vertiports could number in the dozens across a region like the GTA; as battery technology improves, the cost of flying these aircraft will keep going down. Imagine a world where you could walk to a vertiport near you, hop on an eVTOL, and travel from Oshawa to downtown—at a cost no higher than an Uber Black. Instead of taking the train or waiting in traffic, your morning commute could be a five-minute trip with a view. These are the air taxis of the future.

Tony Davis is a co-founder of NectAir. 

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