Roster
Your published block of duties for the month: flights, standbys, training, days off and leave, built against legal duty limits.
Definition
A roster is the airline's published schedule of an individual crew member's duties for a period, usually a calendar month: every flight with its report time, standby blocks, training days, days off and leave. It is built by rostering software against the operator's flight time limitation scheme, so each duty and rest period should already be legal on paper. US crew call the same thing a line or schedule; Europe and the Gulf say roster.
What it means for you
The roster is the document your whole life is organised around, and the differences between airlines are enormous: fixed patterns at Ryanair, seniority-awarded lines at US majors, company-built mixes with limited bidding at the Gulf carriers. Reading a roster properly — counting days off, checking rest and cumulative hours — is a skill worth learning in your first month, because software encodes what the airline asked it to.
In practice
A Qatar Airways roster typically shows 8–9 days off around a mix of Doha turnarounds and 48–72-hour Australian or American layovers, while a Ryanair one at most bases is a fixed five-days-on, three-days-off pattern with no overnights at all.
Go deeper
Related terms
4 terms- BiddingRoster & schedulingRequesting the trips, days off or patterns you want for the coming month, with awards decided by seniority or a points system.
- Roster publicationRoster & schedulingThe date the airline releases next month's roster; EASA guidance points to at least 14 days' notice so crew can plan rest.
- Days offRoster & schedulingRostered days free of all duty at home base; the number per month is one of the biggest quality-of-life differences between airlines.
- StandbyRoster & schedulingA rostered period in which you are not assigned a flight but must be available to be called for one, at the airport or at home.