Advocating for Daylight Savings: A Pilot’s Perspective on Time Changes

^{Written by: Christopher Ball
Photo courtesy of Thomas Merlin}

This article is an opinion piece and reflects the personal views of the author. It does not necessarily represent the official position of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association, its management, or staff.

More and more provinces in Canada (most recently Québec) are talking about dropping the biannual time change from Standard to Daylight Savings time and back.  For many years there have been concerns about the negative health effects of doing this, as well as an increased vehicle accident rate. As soon as we hear rumours of this in our respective regions, we as recreational pilots need to go to our provincial representatives and advocate strongly for keeping Daylight Savings time as the permanent clock, not Standard time. Let me explain.  

When we switch to standard time in the fall, as the clocks "fall back", we "gain" an hour of daylight in the morning but we "lose" an hour of daylight in the evening. The opposite holds true when we spring forward. Now, in reality this is all semantics because the sun keeps doing its regular thing, it's just that we adjust our clocks.  However, the impact comes from any of us that work or have a daytime schedule that needs to align with everyone else. If you are retired and fly, this makes no difference, but if you work and fly, there will be a big impact if Standard time is chosen year round. For most of us, our flying happens on weekends or, when we can, after work.

Currently, with Daylight Savings time in the summer, the sun sets as late as 2130 at night, for some of us even later. Since many of us cannot get home from a work day much earlier than 6 or 7 o'clock, we still have two and a half hours of usable flying time in our day! If standard time becomes the norm, we immediately lose an hour. In the shoulder seasons, when the sun starts setting closer to 2000 or even 1900, our chances of getting home from a day of work and getting the beautiful evening flight diminishes dramatically. This doesn't only apply to pilots; anyone who boats, plays sports, hikes, swims etc can be impacted by this. Later evenings in the winter are not nearly as important as they are in the summer. Switching to Standard time in the winter also has a negative impact for vehicle accidents, because it starts to get dark so early during end-of-day rush hour, when people are tired, so there is always a tremendous spike in evening accidents during the "fall back" change. There are fewer accidents during the "spring forward" stage. 

Québec pilots, reach out to your government now! Other pilots, keep tuned in to your local provincial timechange plans

Christopher Ball
COPA member