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Flight time change - just curious


Camelia-
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We are booked on a direct Air Canada flight in April - Toronto to Sydney (via Vancouver). We depart from Toronto at 8:15 and were supposed to be arriving in Sydney at 10:25 a.m.. I just got an alert that we are now arriving at 8:15 a.m. (but departure time remains the same).

 

I was just curious. Of course I know that flight arrivals/departures change all the time but is it normal to lose two whole hours? What would account for that I wonder? I'm happy because it means two less hours of flying of course but I was just wondering why they suddenly didn't need the extra time!!

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I'm not sure but I think it's because Canada goes on daylight saving time going into summer and Australia goes off it going into fall. You'll actually be in the air the exact amount of time.

 

If you are correct, then that speaks very poorly of Air Canada...since that is something of which they should have been aware when publishing their schedule.

 

Hank

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I'm not sure but I think it's because Canada goes on daylight saving time going into summer and Australia goes off it going into fall. You'll actually be in the air the exact amount of time.

 

Wow, if this is the reason...big oversight by AC scheduling department in the first place. I can't really think of any better excuse, though.

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I hadn't thought of the time change but that certainly does make sense but what doesn't make sense is that we've had these tickets booked for almost a year and only now received the alert. Surely they would have known about the time change? Very strange....

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I hadn't thought of the time change but that certainly does make sense but what doesn't make sense is that we've had these tickets booked for almost a year and only now received the alert. Surely they would have known about the time change? Very strange....

Yeah, you’d think it would be picked up by now. Alaska has done it to us too on Hawaii flights but I can’t remember how far in advance we were told.

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  • 3 weeks later...
I hadn't thought of the time change but that certainly does make sense but what doesn't make sense is that we've had these tickets booked for almost a year and only now received the alert. Surely they would have known about the time change?
AC33 is a direct (one-stop) flight, so the critical thing for working out what's happened is what the intermediate times at Vancouver were before the change. It's very difficult to find out this sort of information retrospectively.

 

The current published schedule seems to be YYZ-YVR 2015-2209, a 1:41 stop at YVR, and then YVR-SYD 2350-0815+2.

 

If the old departure time from YVR was 2350 with an arrival time at SYD of 1025, then what has happened is odd. However, if the old departure time from YVR was a couple of hours later, then all that's happened is that a couple of hours have been taken out of the stop at YVR. This retiming may have occurred for any number of reasons, including the possibility that in the interim AC has managed to get its hands on a landing slot at the more desirable time of 0815 so that it could reduce the duration of the en-route stop at YVR.

 

The chances of the airline's scheduling department having made an error because of daylight saving time changes seems rather remote. This is because scheduling is not done in local time but in UTC/GMT, and then translated into local time when it's published for the benefit of non-industry humans. An error which made the duration of the YVR-SYD flight two hours longer than it really is would almost certainly have been rapidly picked up because it's pretty difficult to make an error in an automated calculation of duration on the basis of UTC/GMT schedules, and everything would be screaming that the aircraft cannot fly for that long (ie about 17½ hours).

 

One other thing which I'd be asking is where the original information came from. If it came from the airline, it would generally be a reliable reflection of schedules. But I would never trust information about schedules, terminals, check-in times and the like given by a travel agent unless it came from a TA who had proved over time to be trustworthy and reliable about things like this. If a TA was not directly passing on information from the airline about your specific flights, they might for example have looked up and passed you the current schedule for AC33, which is YYZ-YVR 2015-2212, a 1:43 stop at YVR, and then YVR-SYD 2355-1025. But the current schedule is for the northern winter 2017/18 scheduling season, and would never have been valid for flights in April 2018 which is in the northern summer 2018 scheduling season. However, most travel agents these days would probably only have the fuzziest idea about IATA scheduling seasons, let alone the complications that arise when individual countries' daylight saving time changes don't align to the ends of the scheduling seasons.

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