Let me show you how to read one line — Page 422, Lesson 376

Let’s talk about what this page actually is, because it looks like a wall of names and numbers, but it’s a very specific tool you’ll use in real flight planning. This is a Standard Times table, corrected to June 1988. It’s a list of places and the standard time they keep, expressed as a number of hours ahead of or behind Coordinated Universal Time, UTC. That number is the key. For every country or territory, the table gives you the offset from UTC — the whole hours, and sometimes the half hours, like 09 30 for the Marquesas Islands, meaning UTC plus nine and a half hours. Let me show you how to read one line. Take Puerto Rico — 04. That means Puerto Rico keeps standard time equal to UTC plus four hours. So when it’s 12:00 UTC, it’s 16:00 in Puerto Rico. The number is always the amount you add to UTC to get local standard time. Now, notice the structure. The left column lists countries and territories alphabetically — Leeward Islands, Martinique, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and so on. The right column is the United States of America, broken down state by state, because the US spans many time zones. Each state has its own offset. California is 08, New York is 05, Hawaii is 10. So the same country can have different standard times depending on where you are in it. There are also special cases. Mexico has a footnote — footnote 1 — saying that most of the country keeps 06, but the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Nayarit, and the Southern District of Lower California keep 07, and the Northern District of Lower California keeps 08. So one country, three different offsets. Now the footnotes are critical, and I want you to pay close attention to them, because they carry the operational limits. Footnote 2 says: Summer (daylight-saving) time, one hour fast on the time given, is kept in these states from the first Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October, changing at 02h00m local clock time. So for any state marked with a superscript 2 — like California, New York, Florida — during that summer period, you add one more hour to the standard offset. And the change happens at 02:00 local clock time on those Sundays. That’s the exact moment the clocks jump. Footnote 3 says: This applies to the greater portion of the state. So when you see a superscript 3 — like Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska — the offset given is correct for most of that state, but not necessarily the whole state. There are pockets that may differ. And the asterisk — like on Paraguay, Uruguay, Trinidade Island — that footnote says: Summer time may be kept in these countries. So for those, daylight-saving is not guaranteed; it may or may not be in effect, and you have to check. Now, why does this matter to you as a pilot? Because when you’re planning a flight, you work in UTC, but you need to know the local time at your departure, your destination, and any alternates — for things like airport operating hours, slot times, crew rest, and NOTAMs. This table is how you convert. You take UTC, add the offset, and you get local standard time. Then you apply the daylight-saving rule if the date falls in that summer window. One more thing to notice: the table is corrected to June 1988. That’s a snapshot. Time zones and daylight-saving rules change — countries change their offsets, they change when they switch. So in real operations, you never rely on a printed table from a book. You use current sources — the AIP, NOTAMs, or a current database. This page teaches you the principle and the method, but the actual numbers must always be verified as current. So the takeaway: this is a standard-time offset table. Read the offset, add it to UTC for local standard time, apply the daylight-saving footnote when the date requires it, and remember the asterisk means summer time is optional. That’s the whole tool.