Fox_one perfectly highlights the problem with flydubai's fatigue reporting system. If you reported fatigued you would be taken off flying whilst the company decided, in consultation with an AME, if fatigue was an issue. This could take a considerable time, and if they decided that it was not then the time you spent not flying was recorded as sick leave. Bearing in mind that you were only allowed paid sick leave for fifteen days per year, if they decided that there was nothing wrong with your roster and you were therefore not fatigued you could potentially spend a long period not being paid until you returned to flying, and living in Dubai is expensive, especially if you have a family. To be fair to the company they did go through the motions of improving things, but even two years after the accident one of the second officers was called into a meeting with the chief pilot after he had not felt fit to fly due to lack of sleep having been kept awake by his newly born baby, to be told by the chief pilot that in his (the chief pilot's) opinion, if he could not manage his sleep with a new baby in the house he was not only unfit to be a professional pilot, but unfit to be a parent. That, by the way, was the new chief pilot who was put in place when the previous one was promoted out of the way following the accident. With that sort of thing to contend with it is hardly surprising that people didn't report fatigued, instead it was not uncommon for occupants of both seats to be taking controlled rest of one or two hours on long night flights.
There were also issues with training. I joined the company as a type rated DEC two years before the accident happened and left two years afterwards. For my OCC I was paired up with a type rated F/O, and despite what was quoted in the report regarding the training to use the HUD we never swapped seats, so that was at least one F/O who didn't get to use the HUD during his training. Also, despite the syllabus quoted in the report, shortly after the accident I asked an F/O who I knew had joined non type rated how many standard two engine go-arounds he had done in training and the answer was one, flown by the captain during LVO training. He had done a couple of others due to systems failures, also in the LVO training, but had never done one himself. He had also never flown using the HUD as his training had been done with two F/Os and a stand in captain, so also no seat swapping, although he had seen the hud repeater image in the back of the sim whilst observing. Also, up until the accident there was no SOP to brief how a go around was to be flown, indeed when I did this on my first day of line training I was told by the LTC not to do so, as it wasn't SOP and might confuse F/Os who did not have English as their first language.
On the subject of the HUD, I can't help thinking that flydubai did the accident crew, and indeed all the crew members who went through the type rating training with them, a great miss service. The SOP, as high lighted in the accident report, was for the HUD to be used for all stages of flight, and as mentioned in the report their are many stages of flight where this is not an advantage. Flying the HUD, for those who haven't done it, is just like being in a giant computer game, and takes away a lot of situational awareness, as you don't have the map display to look at. Also, flydubai got everyone into a mind set of flying all approaches manually from 1000ft, as that was what was required for a cat3a approach. With the weather conditions these pilots experienced at Rostov I9and this is just personal) would have left the automatics engaged for as long as possible, right down to cat1 minimas if I felt it neccessary. There was no reason for the captain to disengage the autopilot and auto-throttle except that it was what he was used to doing. Many of the captains who joined the company from other airlines would ignore the SOP and only use the HUD for cat2 or 3 approaches. Unfortunately flydubais training in bad weather ops was limited, as most line training flights were done on short sectors around the Gulf to make it easier for the line trainers.
As a caveat to all this, I left two years ago. Maybe things have changed, but I'm surprised that this isn't being discussed on the ME forum or that there don't seem to be more posts from flydubai pilots. Having said that I am lucky not to have to access pprune through a VPN anymore, and wonder if it is still blocked in the UAE?