Flying from Seattle to San Francisco?
Add a departure date and see which side gets the sun.
Flying from Seattle to San Francisco?
Add a departure date and see which side gets the sun.
Flying from Seattle to San Francisco?
Add a departure date and see which side gets the sun.
Seattle → San Francisco
A short flight within United States. Same local time zone at both ends.
The Emerald City
Seattle is built across hills and water, squeezed between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, with its core neighborhoods threaded between the two. Light rail runs the length of the city and out to the suburbs, making it one of the more transit-friendly West Coast cities, though the hills and water still shape how neighborhoods connect. Rain is frequent but usually light, more gray drizzle than downpour, especially from fall through spring. Traffic across the bridges and the floating highway can bottleneck badly at peak times.
Nearby airports
| 205 km / 127 mi |
Surrounding hubs
| 1,692 km / 1,051 mi | |
| 727 km / 452 mi | |
| 1,107 km / 688 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
| 1,289 km / 801 mi | |
| 543 km / 337 mi | |
| 665 km / 413 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.