Alright, Hear Me Out: You Can Time Travel in November

Just yesterday morning—and every other morning this week, really—I woke up from a deep slumber with a nostalgic sense of doom and gloom. “Far are the days in which 7 am was actually 8 am,” I moped to myself, tired. “It’s almost as if daylight saving will never end.”

Except it totally is, and a quick Google search prompted by one too many suspicious thoughts revealed that the end is nearer than I thought. On November 3, the clock is officially running back, which means—you guessed it—that, at least for one day, you’ll be able to sleep one extra hour.

If the logistics of such a phenomenon aren’t crystal clear, here’s how it works: At 2 am local time on Sunday, November 3, the clock will go back one hour. That means that if my math doesn’t fail me, from 1:59 am, we’ll go back to 1 am instead of 2 am. So far, so good.

That got me thinking, however, that there must be some advantage to daylight saving time besides gaining sleep. Soon, it clicked: You can technically time travel by plane.

If you plan it right, you can gain one extra hour in your chosen destination without hopping on a faster plane. Think about it: If, say, you were to leave Los Angeles on Saturday, November 2 in the morning and managed to snag a red-eye flight to New York City, you’d be in the air when the time changes in Los Angeles, and it’ll already have changed in NYC because the east coast is three hours ahead and the flight is roughly five hours long. As a result, you’ll get to NYC one hour earlier than you normally would. So there’s your free extra time.

The same goes for the other way around, though there are a few things to remember. If you were traveling from NYC to Los Angeles, you’d have to find a red eye, which is a rarer (albeit existing) occurrence for this route.

Once you do that, you must ensure the flight leaves late enough for the trick to work. If the flight takes off at midnight, it will land in Los Angeles roughly around 5 am New York time (usually, it would be 6 am, but remember the time change!). In Los Angeles, that would typically be 3 am, but it will actually be 2 am because the clock fell back one hour at 2 am.

You’re good as long as you land in Los Angeles on or after 2 am local time. And you’ll basically be traveling back in time. Once you land, the time won’t really be what the clock is signaling because the clock will have already fallen back one hour. So, if you land at 3 am local time, that would actually be 4 am if the time didn’t change. Confusing, I know, but valid!

This time travel trick is only doable when both origin and destination participate in daylight saving time. Some places, such as many countries in South America, don’t adopt daylight saving altogether, so you can’t apply it when flying there. And, in most of Europe, daylight saving time ends on October 27, so you can only use the same trick if you decide to fly there on November 3.

And if you don’t really feel like time-traveling, I get it. Enjoy that extra hour of sleep and call it a day—you deserve it.