About whichsidetosit

whichsidetosit answers one question: which side of the plane should you sit on for the best views? Enter a flight - origin, destination, date and departure time - and we tell you whether the left or right window wins, and exactly what you'll see.

The site exists because the answer is almost never where you'd expect to find it. Forums give conflicting anecdotes from flights taken years ago at different times of day; airline seat maps tell you about legroom, not scenery. Yet the underlying question has a precise, computable answer: the sun's position is astronomy, flight paths are geometry, and mountains famously don't move. So we compute it.

What you get

• A clear left or right window pick for your exact flight.
• A breakdown by takeoff, cruise and landing, written in plain English.
• Sunrise, sunset and glare, worked out for the moment you'll actually be in the air - date- and DST-aware.
• Mountains, ranges, coastlines, cities, lakes, waterfalls and famous landmarks along your route, and which side they fall on.
• Smart about day vs night: city lights after dark, not empty fields.
• Works for any airport in the world, instantly, for free.

How the verdict is computed

In brief: we model your flight as a great-circle path sampled at 100 points, timestamp each point using real timezone data, compute the sun's compass position at every moment, and test ~15,000 catalogued sights (built from Wikidata, GeoNames, OurAirports and Natural Earth, plus a hand-curated list) against the aircraft's heading to assign each one a window. Sights are scored and ranked - sunrise/sunset beats landmarks beats terrain beats glare-avoidance - into a per-phase verdict. The full method, including what we deliberately don't claim, is documented in how it works.

Results are a well-informed estimate based on the geometric flight path. Real routings bend around weather and traffic, and no calculator can promise a cloudless day - treat the verdict as a great head start rather than a guarantee.

The guides

Alongside the calculator we publish original guides on the craft of window-seat flying: the geometry of left vs right, chasing sunrises, avoiding glare, decoding seat letters, night flights and the world's most scenic routes. All of it is written for this site and grounded in the same engine that powers the verdicts.

Built by

whichsidetosit is built by Chandra Bose, a small independent project that's not affiliated with any airline, and it's free to use. Spot a wrong verdict or a missing landmark? Tell us - flight-tested corrections are the best way the site gets better.