Flight Experiences in August

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 Okavango Delta has no road access to its interior. Light aircraft are how you get there. The flight from Maun over the Delta channels to a remote bush camp is not a transfer; it is the first and one of the best wildlife experiences of a Botswana trip, with the aerial perspective of the Delta's intricate waterway system giving a view that changes completely with the seasons. Beyond camp transfers, specialist operators run dedicated aerial photography flights low over the Delta at first and last light, following herds, tracking predators, and working the kinds of shots that ground-level access cannot give.