Problems with certain times occuring twice (or not at all) on night of daylight saving time to standard time transition
- By
- Aparna Patel
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- 26 Jul, 2023
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UTC is typically used for co-ordinating flight plans, air traffic control, and so on, for precisely this reason. UTC is ‘standard’ time in the sense that all other timezones, including daylight-adjusted ones, are set against it.
Of course, UTC is typically not used in day-to-day use by the public, so times in timetables, etc., will still typically be shown in local (daylight-adjusted time). In your examples, the only unambiguous way to express 2.29 when it occurs ‘twice’ would be to append the timezone identifier (for example, the UK uses GMT or BST, depending on the time of year). It isn’t a problem very often!
I have flown from the US to Europe before during a mismatched week (the US adjusts away from DST a week before Europe). It wasn’t a problem; the local times were just adjusted accordingly on the tickets, airline website, etc.
As for trains, in Sweden, trains at the end of DST will stop at the first station possible after 1:00 UTC (the instant the clocks are put back). As to the start of DST, all trains will instantaneously acquire a one hour delay at 1:00 UTC, and do their best to make up for the delay. If you take a night train at the start of DST, be prepared to have a one hour delay in the morning!
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I found an interesting discussion on Airliners.net, and some of the forum posters seem to be working in the industry. To summarize some of the comments, it can be a source of major confusion both for passengers, crew members (forgetting about DST switching and arriving late), ground personnel (longer shifts than usual) and apparently entire airlines, especially for flights between destinations that do not switch to DST at the same time (or one of it doesn’t use DST at all).
For most parts of the world, it would seem that domestic flights wouldn’t be affected much, as these are rare in such ungodly hour, however the situation is different for international flights. There is a blog rant on this very issue for US flights.
Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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