@CONSO
Yes... Take Off at 0000 GMT and with LAE being GMT +10 that made it 10:00 am. It is really quite convenient that they did leave at 0000 GMT because all the elapsed times of the flight coincide with the GMT time. Local times rarely figure into the flight but when they do they do cause a litttle confusion and particulary the old U.S. Navy times used I would rather forget because of "half-hour differences in "ship time " at HOWLAND for example was different to "Island time" and the Hawaiians on Howland used Honolulu Time ...... The 0518 GMT call is in the same Local time zone as LAE for instance but the NUKUMANU Local time zone is one half-hour ahead so that 0718 GMT at Lae is 1718 or 5:18 pm Local but at NUKUMANU it is 1748 or 5:48 pm Local so you can see that as soon as they saw NUKUMANU they were into night flying.... At the Latitudes where LAE, and RABAUL are, "Night-time" shuts the door as early as 5:45 pm Local time and by 6:00pm it is dark.
I also use Decimal time when writing elapsed time, for instance 10.6 hours means 10 Hours and 36 minutes. In aviation now it is almost totally, the norm to record flight times to the nearest 3 minutes (0.05 Hours) with 0.1 hour being 6 minutes. Working in MS Excel it is convenient to use decimal time. I will use decimal time when writing and then also at times, put the hours and minutes in brackets with the hours and minutes separated by a colon..
Being as you are going to work on the Excel Solver, if you will PM me or email me your email address I will send you a MS Excel file showing all the different times involved in the saga just to confuse you and make your eyeballs roll !!!!! The file has ITASCA Time, HOW Time, HNL Time in the Western Hemiphere, a Central column of GMT Times and then LAE Time and Nauru Time in the Eastern Hemisphere, so that you can compare all the times in a single line. NAURU had two time zones just to further confuse the issue as they had a "Civil" time and an "Official" time, with 30 minutes difference..
Last edited by David Billings; 17th May 2018 at 22:11.