Which side of the plane?
Enter your route and departure time and we'll work out which side of the aircraft has the sun, using real sun-position geometry — not a guess.
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Why the side you sit on actually matters
A window seat on the wrong side turns a sunset flight into two hours staring at a dark cabin wall while everyone on the other side has their phone out. It works the other way too — a long daytime flight on the sun-facing side, especially westbound, can mean hours of direct glare with the shade forced down, while the far side stays comfortably shaded the whole way. Neither is obvious from a booking screen, and airline seat maps never mention it — it's the kind of thing you only find out the hard way, mid-flight, once it's too late to do anything about it.
It matters most on three kinds of trip. Sunset and sunrise flights, where being on the right side is the difference between a genuine view and nothing. Northern lights flights — high-latitude routes across the Atlantic or over Scandinavia in the winter months, where aurora sightings depend entirely on which side of the aircraft is facing north at the right moment, and being on the wrong side means missing it completely with no way to move once seated. And long daytime routes where you'd simply rather not spend six hours with the sun directly in your eyes every time you lift the shade.
The practical fix is booking ahead, not hoping to swap once you're on board — by the time boarding is finished, the seats you'd want are usually already taken, and cabin crew have understandably little patience for shuffling passengers mid-flight for a view. Check this before you select your seat, not after you've already picked one and discovered which way the aircraft actually points at the moment that matters. It costs nothing to check and takes less time than choosing a seat from the airline's own map usually does.
Worked examples
Real output from this tool for three specific departures — not illustrative guesses. Run the same route through the calculator above for your actual date and time, since the answer genuinely changes with both.
| Route | Departure (local time) | Result |
|---|---|---|
| London Heathrow → New York JFK | 21 June, 15:00 (14:00 UTC — BST is UTC+1 in June) | Left side, consistently — a good match for the common advice that afternoon westbound Atlantic crossings favour the left for sunset views. |
| London Heathrow → Dubai | 15 January, 09:00 (also 09:00 UTC — GMT is UTC+0 in January) | Right side, consistently. |
| Sydney → Los Angeles | 1 November, 21:00 (10:00 UTC — AEDT is UTC+11 in November) | No single winner — a 14-hour trans-Pacific flight crosses enough longitude and heading change that the sun genuinely swaps sides mid-flight. |
How this works
We take your departure and arrival airports' real coordinates, sample four points along the great-circle route between them (departure, a third of the way, two-thirds of the way, and arrival), and calculate the sun's exact elevation and compass direction at each point and moment using a standard solar-position formula — the same approach behind NOAA's own public solar calculator. We compare that to the aircraft's actual heading at that point in the route, which drifts along a long great-circle flight rather than staying fixed, to work out whether the sun sits on the aircraft's left or right.
This is genuine geometry, not a rule of thumb — but it can't account for cloud cover, and it assumes your flight roughly follows the direct great-circle route and the scheduled duration, which real flights sometimes deviate from for weather or air traffic reasons. Treat the result as a strong steer, not a guarantee.
A note on northern lights specifically, since it's one of the main reasons people ask this question: this tool tells you which side of the aircraft faces which compass direction and whether the sun is up, not whether the aurora itself will actually be visible that night — that depends on real-time geomagnetic activity, which isn't something a fixed route calculation can predict days or weeks in advance. What it can genuinely tell you is which side to book if you want the best chance of a dark, north-facing window once conditions are right, on a high-latitude winter route where that's realistically on the table.
Frequently asked
- How does this actually work?
- Real astronomy, not a rule of thumb. We calculate the sun's exact position (elevation and compass direction) at several points along your route's real flight path, using the same solar-position formula behind NOAA's own solar calculator, then compare it to the direction the aircraft is actually heading at each point.
- Why do you ask for local time and not UTC?
- Almost nobody knows their flight's UTC departure time by heart, so we convert it for you — using each airport's real IANA timezone (not a rough guess from longitude, which gets it wrong near timezone borders and for places on a half-hour offset like India) to work out the exact UTC instant, and we show you that converted time so you can check it against your boarding pass. A small number of airports don't have timezone data yet; if you hit one, we'll say so rather than guess.
- Why do you ask for flight duration instead of just knowing it?
- Real flight time depends on the specific aircraft, route and winds on the day, which we don't have access to. Use the scheduled duration from your booking — it's normally accurate to within half an hour, which is precise enough for this.
- Does this account for clouds or weather?
- No — this is pure geometry, where the sun is relative to the aircraft. Cloud cover on the day is the one thing no calculation can tell you in advance.
- Is left/right the same as which seat letter I should pick?
- Left and right here mean the aircraft's own left and right, facing the nose — the universal aviation convention. Which seat letters sit on that physical side varies by aircraft and airline, so check the specific seat map for your flight once you know which side to look at.
- How accurate is the sun position calculation itself?
- The underlying formula is accurate to a fraction of a degree for elevation and azimuth — it's the same class of calculation used in real solar-tracking and navigation tools, not a rough estimate. The genuine uncertainty in this tool comes from the inputs you provide (an estimated flight duration, an assumed direct route), not from the astronomy itself.
About Best Plane Seats. Best Plane Seats is a free seat-map and seat-advisory site, built after SeatGuru shut down in October 2025. Every seat map is generated from real cabin geometry rather than hand-drawn or copied, with honest confidence ratings and a human review step before individual scores are published as verified. It is not affiliated with any airline. Read more about how it works.
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