Scenic Flights
Some of this country simply cannot be reached on the ground.
New Zealand's most dramatic terrain — the glacier névés, the Fiordland interior, the alpine spine of the Southern Alps — is either inaccessible or takes days to walk into. Scenic flights are unusually common here for exactly that reason, and in some places they are the only practical way to see the thing you came for.
The Southern Alps and Aoraki
Ski-plane and helicopter flights from Mount Cook village and Franz Josef land on the upper glacier snowfields, where you step out onto snow that will take decades to reach the valley floor. The ski-plane landing on the Tasman Glacier is the classic.
Flights routinely circle Aoraki/Mount Cook itself at 3,724 metres. On clear days the view runs from the Tasman Sea to the Canterbury Plains in a single sweep.
Milford and Fiordland
Flying into Milford Sound from Queenstown turns a twelve-hour coach day into a couple of hours and crosses country no road goes near — hanging valleys, unnamed lakes, and the Sutherland Falls at 580 metres.
Fly-cruise-fly packages combine the flight with a boat trip on the fiord. They cancel readily in the region's frequent low cloud, so build in flexibility.
Volcanoes and coastlines
Flights over the Central Plateau take in Ruapehu's crater lake, Ngāuruhoe's cone and the steaming ground around Tongariro.
In the Bay of Islands, floatplanes and helicopters run to Cape Reinga and over the Hole in the Rock. Rotorua flights cross the Mount Tarawera rift, the scar from the 1886 eruption that destroyed the Pink and White Terraces.
Header photograph by W. Bulach via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY / CC BY-SA.