How to avoid sun glare on a flight (and why it matters)

Most seat-picking advice is about what you want to see. This guide is about the opposite problem: the sun as an adversary. On the wrong side of a long daytime flight the sun will cook your seat, wash out your screen, wake you every time your neighbour opens the blind, and put a hard white blowout through every photo. Avoiding it is just as computable as chasing it.

When glare is worst

Glare is at its most brutal not at midday but when the sun is low and side-on - within about 35° of the horizon and roughly perpendicular to your heading. High sun mostly hits the top of the fuselage; low sun comes straight through the windows at eye level and reflects off the wing. That means long east–west flights in winter (low sun all day) and any flight in the two hours after sunrise or before sunset are the high-risk cases.

Typical worst offenders:

Westbound afternoon long-haul - you fly with a low sun ahead-left or ahead-right for hours, because you're keeping pace with it.
North–south routes at midday in winter: the equator-facing side (south-facing in the northern hemisphere) takes low sun for most of the flight.
Post-sunrise eastbound departures - sun dead ahead, then side-on as the route bends.

Predicting the sunny side

Same arithmetic as chasing the view, run in reverse: take the sun's compass bearing during your flight window, compare it with your heading, and book the other side. Northern-hemisphere shorthand: the sun spends the middle of the day in the southern half of the sky, so on an east–west flight the north-facing side (left flying west, right flying east) is the reliably shaded one. In the southern hemisphere, flip it. Near the equator, and in midsummer at high latitudes, the shorthand breaks down and it's worth running the actual calculation - our verdicts include a glare-avoidance factor and will tell you which side stays comfortable.

Why the "wrong" side is sometimes right

If your goals are sleep, working on a laptop, or keeping a toddler cool, the shaded side is simply the better seat even if the famous mountain is on the other one. This is a real trade-off our engine has to make too: when a landmark and heavy glare fall on the same side, the verdict weighs how special the sight is against hours of direct sun. A once-per-lifetime Himalaya pass wins; a mid-tier city under a low westering sun usually does not. You should apply the same judgement to your own booking.

Damage control if you're stuck

On many modern aircraft with electrochromic windows the crew can darken the whole cabin; on ordinary aircraft, the blind is yours to control - etiquette is to close it most of the way on a bright side rather than fully, so others keep some view.
Screens: maximum brightness fights glare poorly; a matte screen protector and tilting the device away from the window works better.
Photos into the sun are still possible: expose for the highlights and embrace the silhouette, or wait for the sun to drop below the cloud deck and use the underlit clouds.
UV: window glass blocks UVB but lets a meaningful amount of UVA through. On a multi-hour flight glued to a sunny window, sunscreen isn't a silly idea - pilots take this seriously.

Glare, like the views, is decided at booking time. Check the sun side for your specific flight and date on the homepage, and read the geometry guide if you want to be able to do it in your head.

More guides

Or just check your own flight - enter a route, date and departure time and get a left/right verdict in a second.