The old homepage asked you to figure out where to look. Controls above, a map doing its own thing, a recommendation tucked off to the side, and on a phone the whole page had to be scrolled just to see what the app was for. It worked, but a first visit often felt like reading a dashboard before you could use it.
This release is the result of a few weeks of rebuilding FlightSide around the moment that matters most, when you have a specific flight and you want to know which side of the plane to pick.
One view, one decision
The controls, the map, and the recommendation now share one frame. On a laptop, the route, the sun marker, and the day and night band sit next to the seat call with no scrolling. On a phone, the same pieces stack in the order you need them: pick the route, set the time, read the answer, drag the slider to see how the sun moves during the flight.
The old version was not wrong, it just made you assemble the answer yourself.
A new map, built in
The map takes a bigger share of the page, zooms further, and has matching light and dark styles so it feels like part of the design instead of sitting next to it. After the first visit, it loads from the device, so the second time you open a route the map is already there.
The sun marker and the day and night band have been around, but the bigger map is the first place they finally have room to move. Step through a long route with the slider and you can watch the sun slide across the globe with the shaded band moving behind it, at the same scale as the flight path.
Errors that say what went wrong
When a shared link does not check out, each invalid field is now highlighted directly in the dock, so a glance tells you which input to fix. Anything that parses still renders: if the airports are valid, the route draws on the map even while you sort out the date.
Installable, and honest when offline
FlightSide was already installable and already worked offline. What changed is the map. It used to fall back to a plain coastline outline when there was no connection. Now the self-hosted tiles cache alongside the rest of the app, so an installed FlightSide has the same detailed, themed basemap online or off, at the zoom levels you would actually use.
The install experience also fits the rest of the redesign now, with the same look and theme treatment as everything else.
The pages around the tool
The About, Contact, and Journal pages all share the new visual language. The old versions did the job but felt separate from the main tool. They now read more cleanly, and the new nav and footer make it easier to move between them, which matters most when someone opens a shared route link and clicks around afterward.
The journal in particular reads noticeably better. The pages are cleaner, the contrast is higher, and the whole thing feels more like a running log than a list of updates.
The same route, different months
The bigger map makes one thing easier to see: the route does not change, but the sun around it does.
A morning flight from Los Angeles to New York in January heads northeast into a low winter sun. The sun sits south of the great-circle path for most of the crossing, coming in at a shallow angle. The result is fairly consistent from takeoff to landing.
The same flight in June looks different. The sun is higher, the daylight lasts longer, and the balance between sides shifts as the aircraft moves northeast. What starts with a clear edge can narrow by the time the route reaches the east coast.
Long transatlantic flights make the seasonal difference even more obvious. A New York to London flight in December can be dark for the whole crossing. In June, the route may leave in daylight, pass through twilight and night, then return to daylight near arrival. The answer is still tied to the same flight path, but the light around that path has changed.
For short domestic hops, the seasonal difference usually matters less. For anything over four hours, especially on east-west routes, checking the actual departure date rather than a rough estimate can change the recommendation.
A lot of the work is invisible
For those who are curious: design tokens for colors and spacing so every component stays in sync. Responsive image generation so phones do not download desktop-sized screenshots. Two-stage PWA caching so the first visit stays light and return visits feel instant. A handful of quieter fixes too, like the calendar dropdown no longer jumping height between months, and the map camera staying put while you move the timeline.
None of this is obvious at a glance. That is the point.
Open a route you have taken before and step through the flight with the slider. Watch the sun slide across the map with the shaded band moving behind it. Every flight has a bright side, and this release is about making it easier to find.