Adventure tourism company DeepFlight Adventures is set to launch a unique travel experience in the Maldives - with trips aboard a specially designed submarine that "flies" underwater. Adam Wright, the company's CEO, explains how it works

Imagine you've chartered a private plane for a sightseeing trip across a vast, unexplored wilderness. However, instead of heading skyward, your pilot looks down and takes you on a dazzling adventure beneath the waves, sweeping and soaring alongside manta rays and sharks.

This is the experience awaiting passengers on an innovative new three-person submarine, the DeepFlight Super Falcon 3S, that will make its tourism debut later this year in the pristine waters around the Maldives.

Submarines have been used to take holidaymakers into the deep before.

But that experience was more akin to an underwater bus ride, with passengers peering out through small portholes, says Adam Wright, CEO of DeepFlight, a company that designs and manufactures high-performance personal submarines.

"In the Super Falcon 3S, you're able to fly underwater like an airplane and your head is right in the middle of a hemispherical dome - it's a completely immersive experience, but you're not getting wet," says Wright, in an interview from the company's San Francisco headquarters. "You're seeing shipwrecks and kelp, flying with whales and interacting with the environment in a totally different way."