# Over the top, and other ways to fly

A booking is not the only reason to open FlightSide. Sometimes a long trip is a few months away and you wonder what the sun does on a flight like that. Sometimes you have heard that flights from California to Europe go up over Canada and want to see it for yourself. [Feeling lucky](/journal/type-less-wonder-more) already hands you a surprise flight with one tap. Explore lets you pick the surprise.

## Flights with a story

![The Explore map with Bogotá picked, its routes highlighted and its destinations listed](/images/journal/012-explore-and-guide/explore.png)

[Explore](/explore) is in the menu at the top of every page, and it sorts hundreds of popular flights by what happens along the way. Some cross the date line, where the calendar skips a day or repeats one somewhere over the Pacific. Some cross the equator, so you take off in one hemisphere's season and land in the other's. Some are hops so short the sun barely moves, and the time you leave decides your side.

At the top, one map draws every flight in Explore, a web of arcs over the whole world. Point at a line and a card names the route, with a link for each direction, since the flight out and the flight back rarely get the same side. Tap a city and the card becomes a list of everywhere you can fly from there, nearest first. To see less at once, narrow the map to one region or type an airport to light up only its routes.

Open a route and its page asks for the one thing a map cannot know: when you would fly. Add the date and time, and it tells you which side to pick.

## Over the top

Los Angeles to Paris looks strange on a flat map. Instead of a straight line across the US and the Atlantic, the route bends north over Hudson Bay and across southern Greenland before coming down over Ireland. On a globe that bend is the shortest way, and how far north it goes changes the flight.

Leave Los Angeles at 3:30pm on June 20 ([see it](/LAX_CDG_20270620_1530)) and the long northern summer days keep most of the crossing light. Just over a quarter of the flight is at night, and for most of the rest the sun is on the left, so the right side is the shady one. Leave at the same time on January 15 ([see it](/LAX_CDG_20270115_1530)) and 80% of the flight is dark. There is barely any sun on either side, and any window works.

## Walkthroughs, not just answers

![The Guide hub with its how-to cards](/images/journal/012-explore-and-guide/guide.png)

Some questions do not fit in a sentence. Getting FlightSide onto your phone so it works at the gate with no signal takes a handful of steps, and so does making sense of everything on the result card the first time you see it. An answer can tell you it is possible. A walkthrough shows you where to tap.

The [Guide](/guide) is where they live, each with a screenshot for every step. Start with checking your first flight, reading the result, sharing it with whoever you are traveling with, or [using FlightSide offline](/guide/how-to/use-offline). The Guide also has short explainers for questions people have before they ever book, like which seat letter is the window. The questions and answers you may already know are still there, and each one now points to the walkthrough that goes further.

## Try it

Open [Explore](/explore) and pick the group that sounds least likely. Open a route from it, add the date you would fly, then try the same time six months later.