[cratermoon]

In the airline industry they sling huge numbers of dates and times around, and they never include the timezone. What do they include? The airport code. Boarding, departure, arrival, and all other times are always local to the airport. In practice, that means that every piece of code that wants to handle datetimes has to also have access to a way to lookup the timezone for the provided airport code. Have a time at LAX? look up LAX, find the timezone, and compute the offset.

In practice, almost nothing does TZ conversions or datetime math. In effect, airline timestamps are a tuple <datetime, airport_code>, and nothing much messes with that.

[pstadler]

Doesn’t sound great. It‘s also an industry plagued by legacy systems.

[cratermoon]

Oh, it's not great at all. The only upside to it is that passengers looking at schedules and boarding passes don't have to do any timezone conversions for long flights. The departure time is always the time at the origin, and the arrival time is always the time at the destination.

[amluto]

Until you add a flight to your calendar and have to look up the timezone.