The honest answer
Two hundred and thirteen dollars for twenty minutes is a lot of money for twenty minutes, and roughly half of the flights scheduled here across a season never leave the ground. Those are the two facts that make people hesitate, and they are both true. This page answers the question properly: who should book, who should not, and what you are actually buying when you pay for a Franz Josef helicopter flight.
Quick answer
The short answer. Yes, if you can give the village two nights and you book the first morning. No, if you have one night and a bus to catch, because the odds are against you and a refund is not what you came for. The thing you are buying is not a view — it is ten minutes standing somewhere you cannot otherwise reach.
The case against
It is expensive per minute, and there is no way around that. Twenty minutes for two hundred and thirteen dollars works out at over five hundred an hour. That is a normal price for a scenic helicopter anywhere in the world, but it is still a lot of money and nobody should pretend otherwise.
The weather might take it. Roughly half the flights scheduled here across a year are affected. You get your money back, but if you drove five hours for this and you have one morning, a refund is a poor consolation.
The photographs will not do it justice. This is the one nobody warns you about. Ice and snow from the air photograph as white texture, and unless you have something in frame for scale, your pictures will look like a lot of nothing. The experience is in the room, not on the memory card.
The case for
You are not paying for a better view of the glacier. You are paying for the only way onto it.
Strip out the marketing and there are three things in the ticket.
The icefall. There is a moment around minute five when the rainforest ends and the ice arrives, all at once, as a wall of blue-white blocks the size of houses. Every pilot on this coast will tell you the same thing: the headsets go quiet at that point. It is the single most reliably impressive ninety seconds on the West Coast.
The silence. The turbine shuts down at the landing site and the noise stops completely. You are standing at two thousand metres on snow with nothing making any sound at all. People remember this part longer than the flying.
Access. This is the argument that actually settles it. Since the terminal face collapsed in 2012 there has been no walking route onto Franz Josef Glacier. Not an expensive one, not a difficult one — none. The helicopter is not the premium way of standing on this glacier. It is the only way.
Who should and should not book
Based on what people actually regret afterwards.
You have two mornings and an afternoon. The odds are firmly in your favour, and if the first attempt is cancelled you have somewhere to move it. This is the case the whole page is built around.
Take the twenty or twenty-five minute flight on the first departure of the morning. A short flight slips through a marginal window that a ninety-minute one cannot.
The odds are against you and the disappointment is expensive. Do the valley walk, look at the icefall from Sentinel Rock, and come back properly another time.
The twenty-five minute flight is a first-timer’s flight. If you have done this, the thirty-five minute two-glacier flight or the hour with two landings is where the new material is.
These are stable machines flown by pilots doing the same valley forty times a week. Twenty minutes is a manageable length for a first flight, and the landing gives you a break in the middle.
The twenty-minute flight at $213 is a real flight with a real landing. It is not a reduced version of the experience. Put the money you saved into the second night, which matters more.
If you have decided to fly, the next question is how long — and that is the one that changes what you see.
Twenty, thirty-five or sixty minutes→Book direct
Cheapest, most booked, the common upgrade, and the one for photographers.
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Common questions
Yes, if you can give the village two nights and book the first morning. The flight is the only way onto the glacier since foot access closed in 2012, and the ten minutes standing in silence on the snow are what people remember. On a single night with a bus to catch, the weather odds make it a poor bet.
Yes. About eleven of those twenty minutes are over ice, and the flight still includes a landing with time out of the machine. For six dollars more the twenty-five minute flight lands on the ice itself, which is the better buy if it is available.
Take it. The twenty-minute flight at $213 is a complete experience, not a stripped-down one, and it is rated 4.9. Spend what you saved on a second night in the village, which does more for your chances than any upgrade.
Book it anyway, early in your stay, and take a shorter flight. Cancellation is free and the refund is automatic, so the only thing an uncertain forecast costs you is the booking itself — and a clear window that arrives while you have no booking costs you the whole trip.
It is a different product: a flight plus several hours walking on the ice with crampons, a guide and supplied gear, at a considerably higher price and a tighter weight limit. If you want to walk on a glacier rather than look at one, it is the better purchase. If you want the icefall and the view, the scenic flight is.
Two things, consistently: booking the flight for their last morning, and booking one night in the village. Almost nobody regrets the money once they have flown.
Go deeper
Twelve helicopter flights out of one village, from twenty minutes to ninety.
PricesTwelve flights priced per person and per minute, and where the money actually goes.
VerdictTwelve flights ranked for one decision, with a straight answer at the end.
LandingsWhich flights actually put the machine down, and what the difference is.
LengthThe only real variable, and how much country each length buys you.
Which oneTwo glaciers, twenty-five minutes apart, and the flights that show you both.
