StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Posted: **2003-03-13 11:36am**

my english techer has a question - apparently, the military types write zulu after writing the time, and she'd like to know why.

Posted: **2003-03-13 11:50am**

I plagiarized this for your teacher:

The world is divided into 24 time zones. For easy reference in communications, a letter of the alphabet has been assigned to each time zone (less the letters "I" and "O"). The "clock" at Greenwich, England is used as the standard clock for international reference of time in communications, military, maritime and other activities that cross time zones. The letter designator for this clock is Z.

Times are usually written in military time or 24 hour format such as 1830Z. To pronounce this, the phonetic alphabet is used for the letter Z, or Zulu. This time is sometimes referred to as Zulu Time because of its assigned letter. It's official name is Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Previously it had been known as Greenwich Mean Time or GMT but this has been replaced with UTC.

Posted: **2003-03-13 11:53am**

Zulu time is the same as GMT, so zulu is a specific time zone. There are other time zones with different letters. Sometimes it is easier for everyone to operate on the same time or have a base reference point so they'll use zulu.

Otherwise it's ususually looked at as "+1", "-1" etc... depending on wherether it's the time zone that's earlier than zulu or later. You can add or subtract hours (+6, -6 etc...).

Posted: **2003-03-13 11:57am**

For simplicity entire militaries generally run on one time. As has already been pointed out, Zulu is GMT. While this is generally done by NATO nations, other nations militaries use different times as the base. All of the PRC for example, military and civilian runs off Beijing time.