Well the answer here depends on the height of your flight, weather conditions and off course if you have a window seat. People who do not get the window seat simple doze off once the flight takes off. I always wonder if it is the flight that puts people to sleep or do I always company people who like to sleep ?
Anyways I always prefer window seat because you never know if you can catch a glimpse of a flying alien saucer. But honestly I take window seat just to be mesmerized by the views you get to see. :)
Coming back to the this blog, I remember from my childhood days that the farthest we can see is when looking out at a sea is 5 km because the earth bends over and we cannot see further than that. So when I had boarded an Indigo flight from New Delhi to Vadodara and when people were dozing right from the time when it took off, I opened my google map app.
I was basically looking at the places over which the flight was flying and the speed of that small blue dot which tells you your location on the map. I happened to fly near a village in Rajasthan and from the map perspective it seems to me that the distance between the blue dot and the village should be around 4-5 kms. I started peeking out from my window and to my surprise it looked that we were flying just above it. This popped out the question that how far can see from a flight ?
This question was stuck in my mind and after returning home, I knew I had to do some calculations. But after multiple failed attempts, I finally found the way which was nothing but using Pythagoras theorem and off course a little geometry involved.
Below is a video of me explaining how we can find out the distance of horizon from a given height. (This took me half an hour to upload, I guess I need a much speedier connection)
Here is the screenshot of my whiteboard calculations.
In final conclusion, if you are flying in a domestic airlines which flies at the height of 10000 feets (9.18 km) you can see up to a distance of 338 kms!
Good