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WanderNerd
Check a flight

Window Seat

Which side of the plane should I sit on?

Give us a route. We'll work out which side the mountains fall on, roughly when they show up, and where the sun is going to be sitting.

Airport codes or city names. SEA, Seattle, and Seattle-Tacoma all work.

Skip the date and you still get the landmark answer. Add it and we work out where the sun will be, using the departure airport's local time.

Try one

Busy routes with something to look at

Ordered by how much they're actually flown in our on-time dataset, filtered to the ones that cross geography we've curated.

How this works

We draw the shortest path between the two airports, walk our landmark list along it, and work out which side of the aircraft each feature falls on and how far off the track it sits. Add a date and departure time and we run the sun's position along the same path.

What we are not doing is predicting your flight's actual route. Real flights follow airways, get vectored around weather, and do whatever the day's traffic requires. Air traffic control remains undefeated. The full method.

What we have curated

122 landmarks so far, coordinates from Wikidata. Coverage is strongest where the geography is loudest.

  • Mountain West20
  • Southwest19
  • California16
  • Pacific Northwest15
  • Northeast13
  • Alaska11
  • Southeast8
  • Hawaii7
  • Texas4
  • Great Plains3
  • Midwest3
  • Western Canada3

Routes that cross country we haven't curated say so instead of inventing scenery. Great Lakes, long rivers, and long coastlines are a known gap: a single coordinate can't stand in for a 300-mile feature.