In Water Cooler, we talk to interesting Canadians and give Peak Premium subscribers the chance to ask them anything they want. Past guests include Nick Frosst, Jen Agg, and Dan Park.
🤝 Meet Daniel Stoppel. He’s the CEO of NectAir, a Canadian air taxi service that's trying to carve out a new category of travel between crowded commercial airports and hyper-expensive private jets. We chatted with Daniel about the flying taxi biz, how he thinks about the coming wave of electric vertical takeoff aircraft, and why he believes transportation is about to experience a major transformation.
Let's start with the basics: what is a private "air taxi" service? How does it compare to the fancy private jet travel people imagine when they think of "private" and "airplane" in the same sentence?
When most people hear "private flight," they picture billionaires and massive jets. An air taxi is built on a completely different model. All the advantages of private aviation without the excess. Direct flights, no crowds, on your schedule. Designed for business travellers, not billionaires.
We use smaller, modern aircraft that can access over 1,000 airports big jets and commercial planes can't get to. That changes everything: where you depart from, where you land, how long it takes, and what it costs.
You show up just 10 minutes before your flight at a small private terminal, walk steps to your plane, and you're airborne in minutes. No Pearson, no lines, no boarding groups. You get to where you need to go direct, fast, and on your schedule. It’s as simple as calling an Uber (for the sky).
And the price isn't what people expect. We price per aircraft, not per seat, so the more people on board, the more the math works in your favour. A team flying to a meeting and back the same day, splitting the cost, often spends less than they would on business class tickets plus overnight hotel costs. What starts as a time decision becomes a money decision pretty fast.
There's a massive gap between wasting a full day in airports flying commercial and the excessive luxury that comes with a private jet. Nobody was building for the traveller in between. We are.
Who is your typical customer and what is the typical use case?
Someone who's tired of losing entire days to what should be a two-hour flight. The hidden cost of commercial travel isn't the ticket. It's the two hours at the airport before, the layover in between, and the hotel night that didn't need to happen.
One of our customers needed to get to Burlington, Vermont for a meeting. Flying commercial, that's a multi-day ordeal. Connections, an overnight stay just to make the timing work. With NectAir, he left at 9AM and was home for dinner with his family. Two days of his life back from a single trip.
That's the typical story. Even on a straightforward route like Toronto to Montreal, our customers save five-plus hours per round trip. When you're making that trip twice a month, you're getting back an entire work week over the course of a year.
There's a big graveyard in Canada filled with challenger airlines that didn't make it. Your business model is quite different, but I'm sure it's still not an easy space to be in. How will you succeed where these other companies haven't?
You're right, Canada has been tough on challenger airlines. But those companies were fighting over existing market share.
We're not interested in that fight. We're focused on creating an entirely new market. The one that lives between commercial and private charter. Business travellers whose time is money, who've never considered private aviation because they assumed it wasn't for them. Until now, it wasn't an option. We're changing that.
How do eVTOLs fit into your plans for the business? How does that change what you can offer people?
eVTOLs are a big part of our long-term vision, but we're not waiting around for them. Right now we're building the operational backbone: the AI powered ops platform, the customer base, the awareness of air taxi. We're building all of it to be aircraft-agnostic, so when eVTOL technology is certified and commercially available, we can integrate it without skipping a beat.
What changes with eVTOLs is pretty much everything about accessibility. They take off and land vertically, so you don't need a runway. You need a vertiport, which can sit on a rooftop or a parking lot downtown. That brings the departure point to where people actually are. Add lower operating costs from electric propulsion and significantly less maintenance, and the economics get even more compelling.
The timeline is closer than most people think. Joby Aviation and Beta Technologies are targeting FAA certification around 2027, and Transport Canada already has a dedicated Advanced Air Mobility team. We'd expect limited commercial eVTOL operations in Canada by 2028 or 2029. We're building the business and the customer base now, so when that moment arrives, we're not starting from zero.
How do you see eVTOLs changing transportation generally? Will these be something accessible to a lot of people, or will it be more like private air travel today — something for wealthy or business travellers?
The sky becomes the new highway.
eVTOLs will make private air travel accessible to more people than ever before. Same as any transformative technology, early adopters lead and scale follows.
We're already watching it happen. NectAir customers are booking same-day flights the way people used to book Ubers. Private aviation went from something you needed a broker and a week of lead time for, to something you do on a Tuesday because it just makes sense.
eVTOLs accelerate all of that. But the shift is already underway.