What you see on a helicopter tour Maui: the coast, the crater and the tallest sea cliffs on earth

The summit. Haleakala rises to 10,023 feet, and the basin at the top is not a blown caldera in the way people expect. It is an erosional bowl, cut by two large valleys that met at the summit and were later partly refilled by cinder cones. From the air the cones read as a row of red and black mounds on a grey floor, and the scale only makes sense when you notice how small a helicopter’s shadow is on it.

The windward flank. Below the summit, the eastern slope is cut by dozens of stream valleys. This is where the water is, and it is where almost every Maui waterfall you have seen photographed actually sits. The famous roadside ones are the minority; most are in closed valleys with no road, no trail and no viewpoint, which is why the flight exists.

The Hana coast. Black rock, surf, stream mouths and the pools at Ohe’o. The road follows this coast for 620 curves; the helicopter covers it in about twelve minutes, and sees around the headlands the road has to go inland to avoid.

The West Maui mountains. The older of the two volcanoes, and it shows: the ridges are sharper, the valleys are deeper and the whole massif is more eroded. Puu Kukui at the top is one of the wettest places in the islands, and the flights that go up there are flying over bog and cloud forest.

The Iao Valley. Cut straight into the range from the isthmus side, with the needle-shaped pinnacle that appears on every postcard of it. From the ground you see the pinnacle; from the air you see the valley it stands in.

Molokai. Across the Pailolo Channel, and the reason to buy a longer flight. The north shore of that island is a wall of sea cliff — the tallest sea cliffs in the world — with waterfalls dropping straight off them into the ocean. There is no road along that coast either. The two-island listing at $2,653 and the ninety-minute flight at $611 are the ways to see it.

Maui is not one mountain. West Maui is the older volcano, deeply eroded, with sharp ridges and the Iao Valley cut into its heart. Haleakala is younger, larger and smoother, and it carries the summit basin. Between them, lava and sediment filled the gap and made the flat isthmus that Kahului sits on.

From the ground this is invisible; you simply drive across flat land between hills. From the first two minutes of any helicopter tour Maui operators fly out of Kahului, it is the most obvious thing about the island — you lift off a plain with a mountain at each end.

It is also the practical reason the flights split into east routes and west routes. There are two mountains, forty-five minutes covers one of them properly, and only the ninety-minute listing at $611 covers both.

Every helicopter tour Maui operators fly is essentially a choice of volcano. The east routes cover Haleakala, the windward rainforest, its waterfalls and the Hana coast. The west routes cover the older West Maui range, the Iao Valley and the crossing to Molokai.

A forty-five-minute helicopter tour Maui listing covers one side properly. Only the ninety-minute flight at $611 covers both.

What almost every helicopter tour Maui route has in common is that most of what passes under the aircraft has no road to it — the closed valleys of East Maui, the north shore of Molokai, the floor of the summit basin.