Rest, recovery and the role of the roster

The roster shows planned work and rest. It is one part of an ANSP’s fatigue-management approach, alongside reporting and decisions about fitness for duty.

General discussions about wellbeing can support conversations with staff, but they do not establish safe duty limits or replace an operational fatigue-management system.

Questions for roster review

A planning team should be able to identify the applicable rules, explain how they are represented in a roster, and show how changes are reviewed. Useful questions include:

• Which duty and rest limits apply to this unit?
• Who maintains those limits and approves changes?
• How are worked hours compared with the planned roster?
• How are exceptions and fatigue reports handled?
• What changes to staffing or demand require the roster to be reviewed?

The pattern to review

Relevant elements include consecutive duty days, shift length, continuous work before a break, the relationship between work periods and breaks, minimum rest, night-duty limits, rest after night duty and time off within a cycle.

The applicable requirements and numerical limits depend on the operation. See the ATC rostering requirements and guidance for the relevant regulatory sources and distinctions.

The seven-types-of-rest framework

An earlier version of this article discussed a wellbeing framework attributed to Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith. It uses seven categories: physical, mental, sensory, creative, social, emotional and spiritual rest.

These categories describe different aspects of personal recovery and wellbeing. They are not ATC rostering rules, a validated assessment of an individual controller’s fatigue or evidence that a particular roster is safe. They should not be used to set operational duty or rest limits.

Apply the configured roster checks

SkyRoster can represent supported scheduling rules and check a roster against the configured values. This gives planners a way to review duty patterns and investigate rule violations. Accurate records, appropriate configuration and operational judgement remain necessary.

See SkyRoster’s scheduling rules for the checks available in the product.

Updated September 2026: unsupported physiological claims and individual health recommendations have been removed. The article now separates the general wellbeing framework from operational fatigue-management requirements.