Flight Experiences in May

Cappadocia is the most concentrated and well-organized balloon experience in the world. On a calm morning, 80 to 150 balloons rise together over the Goreme valley and the fairy chimney formations of the Rose and Red Valleys, creating a spectacle that is genuinely unlike anything else. Individual flights last 60-90 minutes and lift off before sunrise, drifting at treetop level through the valleys before climbing for views of the wider plateau. The combination of the landscape, the scale of the balloon operation, and the light at that hour makes this a stand-alone reason to come to Turkey.

Talkeetna is the center of Alaskan bush plane culture, and the gateway to the most dramatic glacier flying in North America. Flights from Talkeetna land on glaciers within Denali National Park at elevations between 2,000m and 4,000m, putting passengers on the upper flanks of the Alaska Range in country that is otherwise accessible only to expedition mountaineers. Operators offer everything from 30-minute flightseeing loops to full glacier landings with time to walk the ice. On clear days, Denali's south face fills the windshield. The skill and local knowledge of the pilots, who navigate glacial terrain daily, is itself part of the experience.

The only way to take in the full scale of Victoria Falls is from the air, and Livingstone is the base for the Flight of Angels, the scenic loop over the mile-wide curtain where the Zambezi drops into a zigzag of gorges. Microlights carry a single passenger tucked behind the pilot for an open-air pass low over the falls and the river, while helicopters bank over the main gorge, the spray plume and the islands upstream, often continuing over the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park where elephant and other game graze the Zambezi's banks. From above you can finally read the geology of the place, the line of old fault gorges the falls have carved back over thousands of years. Flights run year-round, and the falls are at their most dramatic from the air when the river is in full flood between April and June.

The Namib Sand Sea only makes full sense from the air. At ground level you see individual dunes; from a hot air balloon or a light aircraft at dawn you see the whole pattern, the long linear dunes marching to the horizon, the dry Tsauchab riverbed threading between them, the pans glowing pale in the low sun. Namib Sky Balloon Safaris is the country's oldest balloon operator, launching at sunrise over the desert and landing to a champagne breakfast on the sand. For a wider sweep, Desert Air flies fixed-wing Cessnas from the lodge airstrip out over the dunes, Sesriem Canyon and the wreck-strewn Skeleton Coast.

The Flight of Angels, the helicopter flip over Victoria Falls, is the only way to grasp the full scale of the world's largest sheet of falling water: a mile and a half of the Zambezi dropping into a zig-zag of basalt gorges you cannot read from the ground. The name comes from David Livingstone's 1855 line that scenes so lovely must have been gazed on by angels in their flight. From Zimbabwe's bank, flights lift over the Main Falls, the Devil's Cataract and the Batoka Gorge, with longer loops adding game over the Zambezi National Park. Microlights and fixed-wing options run too, but the bubble-window helicopter is the classic. It is a short, high-value flight in the middle of a town built for adventure.

Dawn ballooning over Wadi Rum is one of the very few balloon experiences anywhere staged over a UNESCO-protected desert. Flights launch at first light, when the rose-red massifs throw kilometer-long shadows across the valley floor that stood in for Mars in The Martian and Arrakis in Dune. Operations sit under the Royal Aero Sports Club of Jordan, the kingdom's official air-sports body, and a flight runs 50 to 60 minutes drifting over jebels, dune corridors, and Bedouin camps waking below. Compared with the balloon conveyor belts elsewhere, mornings here often put just one or two envelopes in the sky.