Creating Routes Around Daylight Savings Time

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Feb 16, 2018
3 min read

Time-zones are something that we in the travel industry pay particularly close attention to. When creating flights in ameliaRes, we must pay particularly close attention to time-zones to produce the results we want. One notable example is SSIM files, time-zones can have an effect on your SSIM files and not building your flights around them can cause OAG to "fail" your schedules. Below is a guide on how to build or split your routes, so that the offset time of your flights is not affected by Daylight Savings Time. 

The Problem: My flight spans the full year, but I can see that my offset times are different, depending on the time of the year. 

Daylight Savings Time Dates:

Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the practice of setting the clocks forward 1 hour from standard time during the summer months, and back again in the fall, in order to make better use of natural daylight. Because of this the offset times of your flights can vary, depending on the time of the year. Our first step here takes us to an external website to find out what dates in the current year Daylight Savings Time comes into effect. You can use Time and Clock changes lookup by putting in your location. In the current year of 2018, Daylight Savings Time Begins on March 11, 2018. Daylight Savings Time ends on November 4, 2018. For Canada, it will always be roughly these dates, but check the website to make sure, before building or splitting your flights. 

Creating a new route around Daylight Savings Time:

  1. Plan your route around the dates. 
    Example: I want to create a route for the full year. I want to fly between YQM - Moncton and YYZ - Toronto. Because of daylight savings time, I will plan the following 3 flights for this route. 
    Flight 100: 
    January 01, 2018 - March 10, 2018 from YQM at 1300 into YYZ at 1400
    March 11, 2018 - November 4 from YQM at 1300 into YYZ at 1400
    November 5, 2018 - December 31 from YQM at 1300 into YYZ at 1400

  2. Now that you have your route planned around the dates you can follow this link to ameliaRES User Manual: Add Route and follow the steps to create a route. Before you do, check step 3. 
  3. You will create 3, route 100's with the 3 dates you have figured out based on the Daylight Savings Time Dates. You must make sure they all have the same flight number and that none of the dates overlap. The next route should pick up the day after the one before it ends. 

Splitting a route around Daylight Savings Time:

  1. Plan your route around the dates. 
    Example: I want to create a route for the full year. I want to fly between YQM - Moncton and YYZ - Toronto. Because of daylight savings time, I will plan the following 3 flights for this route. 
    Flight 100 will consist of the following 3 routes: 
    January 01, 2018 - March 10, 2018 from YQM at 1300 into YYZ at 1400
    March 11, 2018 - November 4 from YQM at 1300 into YYZ at 1400
    November 5, 2018 - December 31 from YQM at 1300 into YYZ at 1400
  2. Now that you have planned around the dates, it's time for the task of splitting them in ameliaRES. You can follow this link to How to Split a Route. Before you do, see step 3
  3. There are 2 splits you can do with a split route. Here we will be doing a "Date Split". We will need to perform 2 splits to complete this. 
  4. For date split 1 You will use, the Earliest Day in the Year. Since January and part of febuary has already passed, we will use the earliest date in the year that hasn't happened yet. (Febuary 17th) If the new year hasn't started yet, you could use January 01. You will also use the Day that Daylight Savings starts, that you looked up when you were planning your route.  
    Example: 
    Start: Febuary 17, 2018
    End: March 10, 2018 
  5. For Date Split 2, you will use the second set of dates: March 11, 2018 - November 4
  6. Once you complete date split 2, you should have 3 time periods as outlined above in your plan.