what's up guys i'm josh from the free pilot training channel and on today's episode i'm going to be explaining zulu time pilots have to know how to use this because there'll be times when you take off in one time zone and land in another so you could see how pilots atc and other agencies could start getting confused when we start talking about times to keep this from happening we use something called coordinated universal time or utc now your guess is as good as mine why they abbreviated this utc instead of c-u-t i bet you as a couple british guys who came up with that i mean they do drive on the wrong side of the road over there now to really confuse you a lot of people use the slang term zulu when they're talking about coordinated universal time today zulu and utc mean the same thing so to make things easy i'll use the term zulu for the rest of the video when we talk about zulu time this is a current local time in greenwich england people who aren't pilots call this greenwich meantime you might as well just forget this right now now before i move on something important to keep in mind is that zulu time is not affected by daylight savings time but most of the states here in the u.s are and that can make the conversion kind of tricky but before i show you how to do that i want to mention that zulu time uses 24-hour time instead of the traditional 12-hour time that you and i are used to the 24-hour clock starts at the stroke of midnight with a time of 000 hours from there it progresses to 0 100 0 200 0 300 and so on similar to the 12 hour clock all the way up to 1200 or noon beginning at 1200 it's no longer the same it progresses to 1300 1400 1500 and continues around the clock all the way up until 2359 where we start the new day at 000 hours the time 2400 does not exist don't be that guy that says that on the radio the nice thing now is that am and pm don't exist if i say 0 800 that means 8 o'clock in the morning then if i say 1500 that means 3 p.m okay enough of that let's get back to talking about converting to zulu time because you're probably going to see a test question on this now for the tests they're going to give you a chart so you don't actually have to memorize anything okay so first let's talk about converting when we're using standard time this is the time of year when we're not using daylight savings time this happens from early november to mid-march now in arizona and hawaii they're always on standard time because they don't use daylight savings time okay so when we're in the eastern standard time zone we'll add five hours to get our zulu time then each time zone after that we'll add an additional hour let's say for example we're in the mountain standard time zone and it's 11 a.m the first thing we need to do to get our zulu time is to convert to 24 hour time in this case it's pretty easy because it's before noon so 1100 hours is our 24 hour time but if it's afternoon we'll have to add 12 to get our 24 hour time for example 1 pm plus 12 is 1300 hours now let's add our seven hours because we're in the mountain standard time zone and that gives us 1800 zulu pretty simple right then the rest of the year we use daylight savings time that means we spring forward one hour that also means that the east coast is four hours behind zulu time that means central is five mountain is six and pacific is seven don't forget that the pesky state of arizona doesn't use daylight savings time so they'll be seven hours behind zulu all year round the way i remember this is that the word zulu has four letters so during daylight savings time and on the east coast we add four hours to get our zulu time then one hour for each time zone after that okay time for a pop quiz let's say i take off from an airport in georgia at 1 pm local then i fly my piper cherokee around for two hours what time in zulu will i land let's assume we are in daylight savings time go ahead and pause the video if you want to try to calculate this by yourself okay so we said we took off at 1 pm local time the first thing we need to do is convert this to 24 hour time and that will be 1300 local then because we're in the eastern time zone and it's daylight savings time we'll add four hours this gives us a takeoff time of 1700 zulu now we'll simply add two hours because we have a two hour flight and that gives us a land time of 1900 zulu this question is really similar to something you might see on the test before i end this video today i want to show you something really important about zulu time and the chart supplement if you'll notice most of the times in the chart supplement are shown in zulu time but look at this weird plus plus symbol behind this tower's operating hours the legend explains what this is but i want you to see this firsthand first of all this airfield does observe daylight savings time but in addition to that this symbol also indicates that during periods of daylight savings time effective hours will be one hour earlier than shown so during daylight savings time this tower operates from 1100 zulu to 0-200 zulu so that note along with the fact that this airfield is in the central time zone tells me that this tower operates from 6am to 9pm local time and that time doesn't change the entire year hey if you would be sure to hit that like button for me before you watch this video right here i promise you'll thank yourself when you go to take that written exam and if you really want to gorge yourself on study material check out this playlist right here see ya