HELICOPTER SCENIC FLIGHTS · WORLDWIDE
Some views only open up from the air.
Reviews of the best helicopter tours on earth, city by city and canyon by canyon. The Grand Canyon out of Las Vegas, the Napali cliffs of Kauai, the Manhattan skyline, the Southern Alps and the Flight of Angels over Victoria Falls. We sort through the operators so you book the right seat.
Worth the airfare
Three flights you can take nowhere else.
A ten-minute city loop is a thrill anywhere. But dropping below the Grand Canyon rim, banking along the roadless Napali cliffs, and circling the mile-wide curtain of Victoria Falls happen over these places and nowhere else on earth.
The Grand Canyon
Down Into the Grand Canyon
No road takes you here. You lift off from the desert outside Las Vegas, the ground falls away, and then the rim opens and the helicopter drops between mile-high walls of red and ochre rock to land on the canyon floor by the Colorado River. A glass of champagne in the silence, the river running past, a billion years of stone stacked overhead. It is the flight everyone has in mind, and it lives up to it.
- 1 Las Vegas Helicopter Night Strip Flight Tour with Optional Dinner
- 2 Las Vegas Strip Helicopter Night Flight
- 3 Grand Canyon West Rim Helicopter Tour with Champagne Toast
The Napali Coast
Kauai From the Doors-Off Seat
Three-quarters of Kauai has no road at all, and the only way in is the air. A doors-off circuit threads the Napali sea cliffs and the inner walls of Waimea Canyon, then noses up green valleys to waterfalls that fall a thousand feet into jungle no one walks through. The wind on your face, the island unrolling below, the kind of green you do not believe until the helicopter banks into it.
- 1 Kauai Eco Adventure Helicopter Tour
- 2 Kauai Private Doors-Off Helicopter: Ultimate Waterfalls & Canyons
- 3 Kauai Deluxe Waterfall Safari: Helicopter Tour
Zimbabwe & Zambia
The Flight of Angels Over the Falls
They named it the Flight of Angels for a reason. The Zambezi runs flat and wide through the bush, and then the whole river simply drops off the edge of the world in a mile-wide curtain of water and spray you can see from the air long before you reach it. The helicopter banks over the gorge and circles the largest sheet of falling water on the planet, rainbows hanging in the mist below the skids.
- 1 Victoria Falls: Helicopter Tour with Hotel Pickup
- 2 Helicopter Scenic Flight over Victoria Falls 25-27 Minutes Game
- 3 Victoria Falls Scenic Day Tour with Lunch & Helicopter Tour
The flight everyone books
If you only book one seat.
More travellers reach for this one than any other on the site. A safe first booking when you are not yet sure which flight is for you.
The classics
The World’s Most Popular Helicopter Tours
The Grand Canyon, Manhattan, Kauai, Maui, Victoria Falls. The flights travellers reach for first, over the views they most want to see from the air.
Where to take off
Pick your view.
Las Vegas for the Grand Canyon. Kauai for the Napali cliffs. New York for the skyline, Queenstown for the Southern Alps, Victoria Falls for the Flight of Angels, Reykjavik for craters and glaciers. Each one, with the flights it does best.
Which kind of flight
Three ways to leave the ground.
The view you want decides the flight. A quick skyline loop, a canyon descent with a landing, or an alpine flight that ends with the skids on a glacier. Pick the one that fits your trip.
The American West
The country that built the helicopter tour.
More travellers take their first scenic flight over the United States than anywhere else, and it is easy to see why. The Grand Canyon dropping away beneath the skids out of Las Vegas, the red spires of Sedona, the Manhattan skyline at dusk, the green walls of Kauai and the lava fields of the Big Island. From the desert Southwest to the Hawaiian islands, this is where the helicopter tour became a thing you simply have to do once.
See the best helicopter tours in the USA →The Southern Alps
New Zealand was made for the alpine flight.
Out of Queenstown, Wanaka, Mount Cook and Te Anau the country stands up on end: glaciers spilling off the Main Divide, the fiords of Milford and Doubtful Sound, braided rivers and lakes the colour of melted turquoise. The signature flight sets the skids down on a glacier in total silence, snow underfoot and a wall of peaks all around, before dropping back down to the valley floor.
See the best helicopter tours in New Zealand →The best part
The ground drops away and everything changes.
A scenic flight is never just the view. It is the lift in your stomach as the skids leave the pad, the headset crackle of a pilot who has flown this canyon a thousand times pointing out the line the river cut, and the moment the rotor noise fades into the size of what is below you. Twelve minutes or an hour, you come back down knowing a place the way only the birds usually do.
Browse every helicopter tour →The Hawaiian islands
Half of Hawaii has no road in.
The best of these islands is sealed off behind ridgelines and rainforest, and the helicopter is the only key. The Napali cliffs and the dripping walls of Waimea Canyon on Kauai, the West Maui valleys and the towering Molokai sea cliffs, the green amphitheatre of the Koolau range behind Honolulu. Doors-on or doors-off, this is island flying at its most lush, and the islands save their best for the people in the air.
- 1 Kauai Eco Adventure Helicopter Tour
- 2 Kauai Private Doors-Off Helicopter: Ultimate Waterfalls & Canyons
- 3 Kauai Deluxe Waterfall Safari: Helicopter Tour
By time in the air
How long do you want to be up there?
Some trips want a sharp ten-minute loop over the skyline and back. Some want a half-day with a canyon landing and a champagne toast. And some want the full backcountry circuit, an island interior unrolling for an hour. Pick the length, we will point you at the flight.
A short loop
Just get up there.Ten to fifteen minutes over a skyline or a coastline: the city or the cliffs from the one angle you cannot get from the ground, and your feet back on the tarmac before you know it.
Half a day
Cross the rim and land below it.Out over the desert to the Grand Canyon, dropping between the walls to touch down on the canyon floor for a champagne toast. The flight everyone pictures when they picture a helicopter.
The full backcountry
Chase the waterfalls all morning.A long doors-off circuit of an entire island interior: hidden waterfalls, knife-edge ridges and sea cliffs with no road to them. The flight you plan a whole trip around and talk about for years.
Fire and ice
Iceland looks like another planet from the air.
A short hop out of Reykjavik and the green country gives way to something stranger: glaciers cracked into blue, black-sand deltas braided like veins, steaming geothermal fields, and the raw lava of fissures that were erupting only months ago. The landing flights set down on a glacier or beside a fresh crater, in a silence so complete it rings. There is nowhere else you can fly over the planet still being made.
See all 6 helicopter tours in Iceland →By city
Pick where you take off.
Las Vegas for the Grand Canyon. New York for the Manhattan skyline. Kauai for the Napali cliffs. Maui for the West Maui valleys. Sedona for the red rocks. Whistler for the glaciers and a peak landing.
By country
Every country worth leaving the ground for.
From the canyons of the USA to the Southern Alps of New Zealand, the Rockies of Canada to the icecaps of Iceland, the Himalaya of Nepal to the falls of Zimbabwe. Browse by the country whose ground you want to see from above.
Sunrise to dusk
A perfect day in the air.
If you could string the great flights into one day, this is how it would run, from a clear-morning canyon landing to a skyline loop at last light.
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