Building a Duty Roster
A duty roster is a connected block of flying built for you: a chain of real scheduled flights that leaves from where you are standing, is flown for a single operator, and has realistic ground time between the legs. It exists for the evenings when you want to fly but do not want to spend twenty minutes deciding what.
You will find it at Duty Roster in the main menu.
1. Choose your aircraft
The aircraft is the anchor, and everything else follows from it. Pick a type and the roster looks up which carriers genuinely operate that type out of your airport, then flies the whole duty for one of them. You are never handed a day that starts on a Ryanair 737 and finishes on a Lufthansa A320.
If you leave the operator as Pick one for me, a carrier is chosen in proportion to how much schedule it actually has on that type at your airport, so a base's dominant airline usually comes up, but not always the same one twice.
2. Where you start
The roster starts from wherever you are parked. You can change it, and the suggested airports are the busiest ones for the aircraft you picked. Choosing a different airport repositions you there when you accept the roster, so you do not have to fly a positioning sector first.
3. The shape of the day
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Same day | Everything fits inside one duty and finishes where it started. If the flying will not fit the duty limits, the roster is shortened rather than being given a rest. |
| Night stop | The roster deliberately rests away from base and comes home the next day, even when the flying would have fitted into one day. |
| Now | The first leg goes off blocks within the next 30 minutes, so the roster is something you can go and fly rather than read about. |
| Pick a time | Any start within the next 24 hours. That limit is not arbitrary: your bids are released after 24 hours, so a roster planned further out would lose its bookings before you flew it. |
| Published schedule times | Every leg keeps its own timetable slot. A connection means the next real departure after your ground time is up, so the gaps are whatever the schedule gives. |
| My own times | The timetable is ignored. Each leg departs exactly one turnaround after the previous arrival, rounded to the next five minutes, starting at least fifteen minutes from now. |
Turnarounds
The turnaround is a band, not a single figure, because a published timetable decides when the next aircraft actually goes:
- Short — 15 to 25 minutes
- Medium — 25 to 60 minutes
- Long — 1 to 2 hours
Every connection on the roster sits inside the band you choose. On your own times you get the bottom of the band exactly. On published times a tight band is genuinely hard at some airports, and if it cannot be met you are told what had to give rather than quietly handed a four-hour sit.
Only somewhere new
Tick Only land somewhere I have never been and every landing will be at an airport that is not yet in your logbook. Returning to base does not count as a destination, so this works alongside finishing where you started.
Flight time limitations
Rosters are planned against real duty limits: EASA ORO.FTL.205 Table 2, or FAA 14 CFR 117.13 Table B with the 117.11 flight time cap, both in the unaugmented and acclimatised case. When the duty clock runs out you get a night stop instead of an illegal twenty-hour day. The Duty & Limits panel shows each day's flight duty period against its maximum.
These are planning figures for a flight simulation roster. Extensions, split duty, augmented crew and the cumulative 7, 14 and 28 day limits are not modelled.
Nothing is booked until you accept
A generated roster is a draft. Nothing is bid, you are not repositioned and no sheet is issued until you accept it, so you can regenerate as often as you like at no cost. On the draft you can:
- Accept — every leg goes into your bids, you are repositioned to the start airport, and your duty sheet is emailed to you.
- Regenerate — ask again with the same settings for a different day out.
- Change settings — adjust the trip, legs, turnaround, timetable or operator and rebuild, without going back through the wizard.
- Discard — throw it away.
Changing the times
Any leg you have not yet flown can be moved. Use the Time button on the leg, set a new departure, and the legs after it shift with it, keeping the ground time they already had. Reset times puts the whole roster back on the times it was generated with.
When it cannot build what you asked for
Some combinations simply do not exist in the schedule. Rather than failing, the roster concedes the smallest thing it can and tells you exactly what: a different operator first, then not returning to base, then fewer legs, then a later start, then a looser turnaround. If nothing works at all, the message names the setting that is blocking it and what is left on the table, so you know which one to change.
Flying it
Once accepted, the whole roster sits in your bids and in the JSV Flight Logger, which shows each leg's scheduled departure and counts down to the next one. File each leg as normal: the roster follows along, the duty sheet is reissued with the times you actually flew, and the roster closes itself out when the last leg is filed.