Flight Attendant Family Guide: Know When They’re Home

‘Which days are you home this week?’ ‘What time is it there?’ ‘When do you land?’ If someone in your family is cabin crew, you probably ask these questions every month. The person asking doesn’t want to be a bother, and the person being asked may have just landed and still be fighting jet lag, so even a quick reply takes effort.

This guide is for the partners and parents of cabin crew, and for crew members themselves. It covers where families usually get stuck, how to agree on what to share, how to keep it private, and how sharing works in Feiban today.

Three things families usually get stuck on

• Roster codes: a flight attendant roster is a grid of abbreviations and numbers, and every airline writes them differently. DO and OFF often mean a day off, and LO is a layover. Standby might be written SBY, or as an S followed by a number.
• Layover time zones: dinner time at home can be the middle of the night where they are, and in cities that observe daylight saving time, the time difference changes during the year.
• When they land: the roster shows scheduled times. Flights can be delayed or arrive early, so it’s hard to know when to set off for the airport.

None of this means families aren’t paying attention. Rosters are written for crew, not for the people waiting at home. For a fuller list of common codes, see our guide to flight attendant roster codes.

Agree on what to share, and with whom

A roster is work information, and it also shows where someone is. Before you start sharing, it helps to talk a few things through together:

• Who sets up the roster: the crew member can create it, or a family member can set it up from a roster screenshot. Before sharing someone else’s roster, always get their permission first.
• Who can see it: just a partner, or parents too? The fewer people who have it, the easier it is to keep track.
• How much they see: only which days the crew member is home, or also where they’re flying and when they’re scheduled to land?
• Who keeps it up to date: agree who updates it when each month’s roster comes out or a trip changes at short notice, so nothing slips through.

The crew member decides how much to share

Sharing isn’t all or nothing. Whether to share, and with whom, should be up to the person whose roster it is. Depending on what your family needs, there are a few options:

• Send a single image or a short text: Feiban can save the month’s roster as an image, or copy it as text to paste into your family chat. It’s a snapshot of that moment, so later changes won’t show up, and once an image is sent, it can’t be taken back.
• Send a family follow code: family members sign in to the app and enter the code to join, then view the roster within the sharing scopes.
• Keep private things in private notes: the private note on each day is visible only to you and is never shared with family.

Join a family roster in the Feiban app

The family web view has closed. Old links are not family follow codes and never automatically grant account access.

Follow 1 person for free. Following more people requires an active trial or membership, up to 10 people.

1. The person sharing signs in, creates their own roster and confirms the roster owner’s permission. Sample rosters are never shared.
2. Get a family follow code from the app’s family sharing feature and send it only to the intended family member.
3. The family member downloads Feiban on iPhone, chooses to see a family roster, signs in with their own account and enters the family follow code to confirm joining.
4. View the roster in the app. The person sharing can change scopes, remove family members or stop sharing.

What your family sees in the app

• Where they are today: at home, on a layover, or with the day’s plans still to be confirmed. During a layover, the page shows the local time there.
• When they’re home: how many days until they’re home, worked out from the roster.
• The next few days and the whole month: days off, flights, layovers and standby are each marked in a different shade. Days the roster doesn’t make clear are marked as approximate or with a question mark, rather than shown as certain.
• Flight times: tap a day to see each flight in local time. The layover end gets an extra line with the time back home in Taiwan, converted using that day’s time difference, so nobody has to work it out.

Family members control their own viewing

Adjust notification preferences in the app or stop following at any time. Notifications require device permission and confirmed flight data; actual departures and arrivals are as published by the airline.

Keeping it private

• Share family follow codes only with people you trust. After joining, viewing permission belongs to the family member’s own account.
• Old family URLs show app guidance only, with no names or rosters, and are excluded from search indexing.
• Private notes are removed on Feiban’s server, so they never appear on the page your family sees.
• Choose a nickname for sharing; a full name is not needed.
• Remove a family member or stop sharing in the app. Previously saved screenshots and forwarded content cannot be taken back.
• When you upload a screenshot for AI reading, it goes through Feiban’s server to a third-party AI service. Before anything is sent, Feiban lists who processes it and asks for your consent. Feiban’s server doesn’t keep the original image; the third-party AI service may hold it briefly under its own policy to prevent abuse.

For full details, see our Privacy Policy.

A few tips for families

• Standby means the crew member could be called out to fly at any time, even on a day spent at home, so it’s best not to plan anything you can’t move.
• If you see ‘to be confirmed’ or a question mark, don’t plan an airport pickup around that day yet. Asking the crew member directly is quickest.

Share the roster once, and there’s one less question to ask. Family can stop worrying, and the crew member gets some proper rest.

Further reading