What am I flying over? How to tell from the plane

To know what you're flying over, you need two things: a map of your route and an idea of where along it the plane is. With both, the coastline, city or lake outside your window becomes easy to name, and from cruising altitude you can see a long way.

How high you are, and how far you can see

Jets cruise in the airspace above 29,000 feet, usually somewhere between about 30,000 and 40,000 feet, roughly 9 to 12 km up. At mid-latitudes that's around or above the top of the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where most weather happens.

From that height the horizon is a long way off. A standard approximation for the distance to the horizon is 3.57 km times the square root of your height in metres: at 11,000 m that's about 370 km. In practice haze in the lower atmosphere usually cuts clear visibility to a couple of hundred kilometres or less, and clouds can hide the ground completely. On a clear day, big features like coastlines, lakes and mountain ranges stand out well beyond the towns directly below you.

Ways to find out what's below

1. Follow your position on an offline map. Save a map of your route before takeoff and follow the plane along it. FlyingOver does this without GPS: it shows the plane's estimated position along your saved route, from any seat, on a map with country, city and lake names. See how to track your flight without Wi-Fi.
2. Look at the route before you fly. Check the start and end of your route on a map and note which coasts, lakes and mountain ranges lie between them. Knowing that a flight from Frankfurt to New York crosses the North Atlantic and reaches Newfoundland first tells you what the first land will be.
3. Use the shape of the land. Coastlines, big rivers, lakes and islands have distinctive shapes that match the map even when towns don't. At night, city lights make the largest cities easy to pick out.
4. Listen to the cockpit. On some flights the pilots point out landmarks, and aircraft with seatback screens often have a moving map showing the route and nearby cities.

Which side of the plane to sit on

Choose the window on the side where the things you want to see will be. Look at the route before picking your seat: a flight that follows a coastline has the sea on one side and land on the other, and a flight passing a mountain range has it on one side only.

The sun matters too. In the Northern Hemisphere the midday sun is in the southern part of the sky, so it shines on the right-hand windows when you fly east and on the left-hand windows when you fly west. The sunny side gets glare, while the other side sees the landscape lit from behind you. For early and late flights, check the sun's position for your departure time with the solar calculator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

When you won't see much

• Clouds. A solid layer below the plane hides everything; a map still shows where you are.
• Night. Apart from city lights you'll see very little, but the map keeps working.
• Over the ocean. Long stretches of water have nothing to recognise until the next coast.
• Wing and engine. Seats over the wing have a smaller view of the ground. Rows well in front of or behind the wing see more.