Why is my outbound flight to Geneva longer than my return flight?

score:8

Accepted answer

All times are local to the departing or arriving airport. This is always true for any flights you may take.

Since Switzerland is on European time (1 hour ahead of Scotland) the outbound flight (looking just at the times and ignoring timezones) will seem one hour longer than its actual duration as you 'lose' an hour. Similarly you 'gain' an hour on the return leg making the flight seem shorter (again if ignoring timezones) then it actually is.

As an aside, all this means that if you are flying over the dateline terminator (going east) it is possible that the scheduled departure time is later than the arrival time.

Upvote:3

'Air-side', most flight times on ATC systems and the like are based on UTC time. However, passenger-side, for simplicity, departures/arrivals are always based on the airport they're flying out of and into.

As you will no doubt be aware, the world is divided into (roughly) 24 timezones (with some irregularities). Geneva, being in Switzerland, is in a different time-zone, so your clock will change, causing you to jump ahead/behind.

Couple of really weird examples to make you feel better: - my old flatmate basically missed his birthday jumping over the international date line - in Russia, despite it covering around seven different timezones, all trains run on Moscow time. Makes it very confusing!

Upvote:4

@Kris is absolutely correct about timezone difference. In addition, you have to take into account that Earth is rotating toward East. So the planet creates enormous jet stream that blow from east to west. So either headwind or tailwind will subtract or add to the flight speed depend on the direction of your travel.

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