NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Time Zone Designations
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2017 Jan 5, 09:46 +0000
From: John D. Howard <NoReply_Howard@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2017 6:38 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Time Zone Designations
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2017 Jan 5, 09:46 +0000
All times used in aviation are Zulu and pilots had to learn how to convert their local time to Zulu time when filing flight plans and getting weather reports. However, lately, now that pilots get their weather briefing over the internet and file their flight plans the same way we can now set our time zone preference into the computer and so we don't need to do the conversion to Zulu time anymore. I'm old fashioned and I keep the clock in my plane set to Zulu and the Torgoen watch on my wrist has a 24 hour hand also set to Zulu. For taking celestial shots I have a digital watch with two time zones, one keeping Zulu which I use for timing the sights.
On shipboard wrist watches were used for timing sights since you wouldn't bring the ship's chronometer on deck for this Then you would compare your watch (keeping ship's time) to the chronometer and the difference was entered on the computation form as "Watch Error"
for determining the Zulu time of the shot.
gl
From: John D. Howard <NoReply_Howard@fer3.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2017 6:38 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Time Zone Designations
Long haul airplane crews kept logs and other nav records in Zulu. Flew too fast across time zones to even know which one you were in - fly from Alaska to Norway over the top and keep track.
Some of my crew kept two watches. Others, like me, had a Rolex GMT Master with an extra 24 hour hand. I alway kept my watch on Zulu ( Zuul ? ) and after I landed asked the first person I saw "what time is it?" then set the bezel on the 24 hour hand to local time.
I did not know how sailors kept time and it was a source of confusion for me when reading texts on navigation with all the talk of WT and ZT and calculating time etc. I would yell at the book " just keep Zulu!"
Air Force and Navy - different worlds.
John H.
