However, this is where it all originated and UTC and Zulu both refer to the same exact time. It may not be called Greenwich Mean Time anymore, and in fact even GMT is sometimes changed to General mean time to make it less tied to one city. As airliners head off on long journeys, itвЂ™s essential for everyone to be on the same page when it comes to time zones. It also looks and reads better than CUT or TUC.

So whatвЂ™s with the UTC? It turns out it represents a compromise between the two. But UTC en franГ§ais is вЂњtemps universel coordonnГ©вЂќ, or TUC. The UN, which administers this sort of standardization, does still consider French its official language. Perhaps that stands for the French then? A clever guess. Coordinated Universal Time should equal CUT.

You may have noticed that the letters UTC are out of order. But first, we need to take a look at that acronym. So what is this Zulu time? Is it always the same time? Why does it exist and how did it come to be? And why is Greenwich the center of the world, at least when it comes to time zones?ДЄs with so many things in aviation, UTC has plenty of history behind it, as well as being a very useful concept for reducing confusion when operating flights across several time zones. Many aviators refer to it as Zulu вЂ“ which we can probably all admit sounds a lot cooler. It is the central point of reference for time in all things aviation. YouвЂ™ll notice UTC sits right at the top of the Flightradar24 home page, for good reason. But Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is the modern version. In the wintertime, as now, the current time in London (and everywhere else on the time zone) is still referred to as GMT. When it comes to time zones, if youвЂ™re still talking about Greenwich Mean Time thereвЂ™s something you should know: itвЂ™s old news.

Universal time clock