PST vs PDT

If the early morning clouds lift today I plan a short hop to French Valley for PIC and night currency this afternoon. First thing this morning, I logged onto DUATS to take a peek at NOTAMs etc, put in my departure time as 1600 PDT…. and I notice that all the surface observations have a reported time later than it is right now. Hmmm….. a little asking around and who would have thought that PST meant Pacific Standard Time, rather than Pacific Summer Time?! Ok, so every American would!

In my defence, in the UK we have BST which is British Summer Time so all this time I’ve been in CA (about 6 years) I’ve thought that PST was summer and PDT was winter. And all that time my DUATS-filed flight plans have been off by an hour!



2 Responses (Add Your Comment)

  1. Did you stop for dinner, or was it an up and back? They have some of the best airport cafe food in SOCAL (beats the heck out of Flo’s in Chino).

  2. The plan was to stop for dinner, do some stop and goes for night currency and then come back. But… I got out of work late and when I got to the airport the landing light was broken and the interior panel lights were also inop. So I scratched, will try again tomorrow with a different plane.

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Your Pilot In Command

I got my private pilot certificate in Feb 2002, and my instrument rating exaclty one year later in 2003. I fly out of Montgomery Field, San Diego, renting Cessna 172s, 182s, and Piper Archers from PlusOneFlyers. I also have high performance and complex endorsements.

Currently, I have approximately 350 hours of PIC time, including 450 landings, and a monster 6.4 hours of actual instrument time. September 2010