Why is my outbound flight to Geneva longer than my return flight?
I am flying with EasyJet next week from Glasgow to Geneva, for my ski holiday.
I noticed the flight times are unusual in that my outbound journey is much longer than my return flight home.
Outbound
Dep 12 January 2013 10:40
Arr 12 January 2013 13:55
Flight 6835
(3 hours 15 min later)
Return
Dep 19 January 2013 14:35
Arr 19 January 2013 15:55
Flight 6836
(1 hour 20 min later)
Now I am not the best at maths but you can clearly see there is a major time difference in both flights.
Is there any reasoning behind this? I tried searching the Easyjet site but could find no justification for this.
More Info here
Best Answer
@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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Answer 2
'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!
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