And it does my head in having to manually change the time to a daylight period. I often use the goto airport option and guess what, I always arrive in the dark. How can I set this permanently to default to daylight? Thanks for any tips.

Go to your general settings and make sure system time is selected. Remember if your in NY at 9AM and your startup situation is in Seattle it will start there at 9AM not 6AM. It goes by the time zone in your location in the sim not your systems time zone.