Flying from New York City to San Francisco?
Add a departure date and see which side gets the sun.
Flying from New York City to San Francisco?
Add a departure date and see which side gets the sun.
Flying from New York City to San Francisco?
Add a departure date and see which side gets the sun.
New York City → San Francisco
A long flight across United States. Set your watch back 3 hours on arrival.
The city that never sleeps
New York is a dense five-borough city served by three major airports: JFK and LaGuardia in Queens, and Newark Liberty across the Hudson in New Jersey. Manhattan carries the main business districts, museums, theaters, and postcard skyline, but Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island are not side notes; they are much of the city. A car is rarely useful for visitors once they are inside the core. Airport choice matters here because each airport starts the ground trip from a different edge of the region.
City access
Newark Liberty is in New Jersey, west of Manhattan, and despite the state line it can be one of the more predictable approaches by rail. Its AirTrain connects to the airport railway station, where NJ Transit and Amtrak trains run to Penn Station in around half an hour. It is not on the New York subway, so plan around the mainline timetable rather than turn-up-and-go frequencies.
Nearby airports
| 27 km / 17 mi | |
| 33 km / 21 mi | |
| 128 km / 80 mi |
Surrounding hubs
| 322 km / 200 mi | |
| 532 km / 331 mi | |
| 559 km / 347 mi |
The City by the Bay
San Francisco packs a famously hilly, fog-prone peninsula into about 122 sq km (47 sq mi), with the bay on one side and the Pacific on the other. It is one of the few American cities genuinely built for transit and walking: a dense streetcar, cable car, and bus network covers the city, and BART carries it onward to Oakland and Berkeley. Distances are short, but steep hills and scarce parking make a car more trouble than help in the core. Cool, foggy summers surprise visitors expecting California heat.
Surrounding hubs
| 719 km / 447 mi | |
| 962 km / 598 mi | |
| 1,046 km / 650 mi |
Find out which side of the plane to sit on.
Pick your airports, set your departure time, and you're done.
We calculate the sun's position based on your flight path and departure time, then tell you which side of the plane gets direct sun and which stays shaded. No guessing, just math.
Enter your flight
Pick your departure and arrival airports and set your departure time at the departure airport. FlightSide estimates the duration and you can adjust it if you know the exact schedule.
We track the sun along your route
Your flight path is broken into hundreds of points. At each one we check where the sun is and which side of the plane it faces.
You get a recommendation
Which side of the plane to sit on, left or right, depending on whether you'd rather avoid the sun or enjoy it. The percentages and the map are there if you want to see why.
Want to go deeper? Accuracy, edge cases, polar routes — see the FAQ →
Notes from the product.
Small updates, route observations, and clearer explanations for how the app keeps evolving.
Type less, wait less, wonder more
Airport search now understands metro codes and old city names, FlightSide loads noticeably faster, and a new Feeling lucky button chooses a flight for anyone without one in mind.
A closer look at the route, not just the seat
FlightSide now shows the two cities and key details about the flight alongside the seat recommendation: confirm you picked the right airports, read the time change off two clocks, and check the return leg.
It's all about the sun (after all)
Not all sunlight reaches the side windows. FlightSide now weighs the sun’s angle to the cabin and shows twilight along the route.