Scenic Charter Flights in Georgia

Most people discover Georgia’s landscapes through a windshield. They drive the Military Highway to Kazbegi, wind through vineyards on the way to Sighnaghi, or take the long road south toward Vardzia. These are beautiful journeys. But there is something fundamentally different about seeing this country from two thousand meters up — something that no road, however scenic, can replicate.

Bon Voyage Aviation, a Tbilisi-based air charter company, has built its entire offering around that idea. And for travelers who want to experience Georgia’s staggering geographic variety without spending three days in a car, it represents a genuinely new way to travel here.

The Country Makes More Sense from the Air

Georgia is small on the map — about the size of Ireland — but it packs in an almost absurd range of terrain. The Greater Caucasus runs along the north, with peaks exceeding 5,000 meters. The Black Sea coast stretches to the west. Semi-arid scrubland covers the east. Ancient volcanic plateaus rise in the south. Vine-covered valleys sit between all of it.

On the ground, you experience one of these landscapes at a time, separated by hours of driving. From the window of a Cessna, you watch them flow into each other. The Alazani Valley’s geometric vineyard grid gives way to bare foothills, which climb into snow-capped ridges, all in a single unbroken panorama. It’s the kind of view that puts the whole country in context — and it tends to reframe everything you’ve already seen on the ground.

The Aircraft: A Cessna Built for This Terrain

Bon Voyage Aviation operates a single aircraft: a 2022-manufactured Cessna 206 Turbo Stationair HD. The choice is deliberate. The Cessna 206 has a long reputation in mountain and regional flying — it’s turbocharged for high-altitude performance, has a service ceiling of 27,000 feet (8,230 m), and is capable of operating from short airstrips that larger aircraft simply cannot use. That last point matters enormously in Georgia, where many of the most interesting destinations sit well away from major airports.

The aircraft seats five passengers alongside the pilot, with a spacious high-wing cabin that provides excellent downward visibility — critical for scenic flights where the whole point is the view. The 310-hp Lycoming engine gives it a cruise speed of 178 knots and a maximum range of over 1,300 kilometers, more than enough to connect any two points within Georgia in a single leg.

What Bon Voyage Air Actually Offers

The company runs two categories of flights: charter flights, which take you from one destination to another, and scenic flights, which loop out from Tbilisi and return, covering a particular landscape or landmark.

Charter Flights: Reclaim Your Time

The charter routes solve a real problem for travelers on limited schedules. Getting from Tbilisi to Mestia by road takes the better part of a day, involves mountain passes that close in winter, and demands a driver willing to tackle some genuinely challenging terrain. By air, it’s 90 minutes. The same logic applies to Batumi (also 90 minutes by air versus a 5–6 hour drive) and Kutaisi (60 minutes versus 3+ hours).

Available charter routes from Tbilisi include Batumi, Mestia, Ambrolauri, Kutaisi, and Telavi. Additional routes connect Kutaisi to Mestia and Ambrolauri, and Batumi to Mestia — useful for travelers designing multi-city itineraries without doubling back. Prices are quoted as a flat rate for the aircraft, not per person, which makes the economics considerably more attractive for groups of three to five.

Scenic Flights: Georgia as a Landscape Experience

The scenic flight menu reads like a curated list of Georgia’s most visually dramatic places — specifically chosen for what they look like from above.

The Kazbegi scenic flight (1 hour, departing and returning to Tbilisi) takes you north over the Military Highway corridor to Mount Kazbek, one of the Caucasus’s most iconic peaks. Seeing the Gergeti Trinity Church perched on its promontory from the air, with the glaciated summit behind it, is a different experience entirely from standing beside it on the ground.

The Alazani Valley flight (90 minutes) traces the full length of Kakheti’s wine country — the patchwork of vineyards, the river plain, and the Caucasus foothills rising to the north. This one is worth considering as a complement to a wine tour, giving you the aerial geography of the region you’ve been tasting your way through.

The Javakheti Volcanoes flight (2 hours) is the most unusual option: a journey south over Georgia’s volcanic plateau, a high-altitude landscape of extinct craters, crater lakes, and basalt fields that most visitors never reach at all. From the air, the geology is extraordinary.

The Udabno Desert flight (1 hour) covers the semi-arid Kakheti steppe near the Azerbaijani border — a landscape so unlike Georgia’s mountain image that many travelers are surprised it exists at all. It’s also the region where David Gareja Monastery is carved into the canyon walls, visible from above in a way that gives the site an entirely new dimension.

The Khvamli Mountain flight (3 hours) is the longest scenic option, reaching deep into western Georgia’s forested highland — a region associated in Georgian legend with the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece. It’s genuinely remote and rarely visited.

Practical Details Worth Knowing

All flights operate in daylight only and from Tbilisi International Airport or Natakhtari Airfield, depending on the route. The maximum payload of 250–300 kg (passengers and luggage combined) is worth factoring in when booking for a full group of five.

Booking timelines differ by flight type. Scenic flights can typically be arranged the day before. Charter flights require at least seven days’ advance notice, with payment via invoice. Airport fees and handling charges are billed separately from the listed prices.

Prices are per aircraft, not per person — the Tbilisi–Kazbegi scenic flight, for example, is priced at $1,250 total, which divided among four or five passengers becomes quite reasonable for what is genuinely a once-in-a-trip experience.

Who This Is For

Bon Voyage Aviation’s offering will resonate most with travelers who are already sold on Georgia as a destination and want to go deeper into it — not broader. It’s not an airport transfer service dressed up with nice windows. The scenic flights in particular are experiences in themselves, designed to be unhurried and attentive to the landscape.

It suits couples or small groups who want something genuinely different on a multi-day itinerary. It suits photographers and anyone for whom the aerial perspective has intrinsic value. And it suits the traveler who has already driven the Military Highway once and wants to understand what they were driving through.

Georgia from the ground is extraordinary. From the air, it makes complete, panoramic sense.