Free tool
Zulu time converter
Convert between Zulu and local time at any airport, in either direction. The offset comes from the airport’s own timezone rules for the date entered.
Or try one of these
Leave the date and time blank for right now. The offset comes from the airport’s own timezone at that instant.
How this works
- An offset belongs to a moment, not a place
- Denver is UTC-6 in July and UTC-7 in December. Australia changes in the opposite months. Nepal is five and three quarter hours ahead and never changes at all. A fixed offset is wrong the moment a flight crosses a daylight saving transition, and wrong all year for places whose offset is not a whole hour. The correct conversion uses the airport's own timezone rules for the date in question.
- The date can change across midnight
- Zulu and local frequently sit on opposite sides of midnight. An evening departure from the US is already tomorrow in Zulu. A morning departure from Australia is still yesterday. A flight plan filed against the wrong day looks entirely reasonable on the form.
- The skipped hour does not exist
- On the morning the clocks go forward, the skipped hour has no real instant behind it. 02:30 local in Denver on that day does not correspond to any moment in UTC. The repeated hour in autumn is different: either instant is a truthful reading of a clock that showed that time twice.
20:00 local on July 15 is 02:00 UTC on July 16.
Not a substitute for an official pre-flight weather briefing.