"HAVE YOU EVER wondered what it feels like to be an astronaut?" asks our pilot, Bertus Schoeman. The question is out of the blue—literally. We've been cruising through crystal skies in virtual silence for the past half-hour, too rapt with the passing panorama of honeyed dunes and roiling, black Atlantic waters beneath us to bother with speaking. Before anyone has time to respond, Schoeman throttles the engine and jerks the nose of the four-seater Cessna 210 into a Virgin Galactic–esque trajectory.

It's a sunny afternoon on the Skeleton Coast, a 500-mile-long strip of gnarled basalt and wind-sculpted sand in northern Namibia, and the massive landscape is blotting out the high-pitched whine of the plane's small engine. Photographer Jen Judge and I are on board one of the most sweeping safaris on the African continent, Namibian Encounters, a new ten-day flying excursion that takes in the country's finest other-worldly landscapes, from the Namib Desert in the south to Etosha National Park in the north, with a Skeleton Coast flyover along the way.

At the moment, however, all I can see is the immense blue sky as the plane hurtles away from the ground. Just when my jitters are heading for full-fledged panic, Schoeman suddenly veers the aircraft earthward. For a moment we all hover, weightless, out of our seats. Jen's seat belt, which she's loosened just enough to maneuver around while taking photos, hangs in a swooping arc above her lap. Schoeman's head presses up against the ceiling. Pebbles and a bronze coin that lay on the dashboard an instant earlier are now suspended in space. Then it's over. The plane has leveled, Schoeman is quietly explaining that Ron Howard used that stunt to obtain weightlessness in Apollo 13, my stomach has eased out of my throat, and Jen and I are grinning from the thrill. "This is no commercial flight," Schoeman concludes in his Afrikaans deadpan.