With respect to their rosters, days off, and leave.
During the flydubai interview it was said that condensed blocks of flying would be complemented by extended blocks of days off. The suggestion being that the roster would provide enough days off in a row to allow short trips to your home overseas to be made on a reasonably frequent basis. A good number of pilots joined flydubai based exactly on that premise.
The reality however is that crews at flydubai get a roster that gives them a very even distribution of duties across the month. Some might just occasionally get 3 days off in a row, but more usually they get just 2 days off in a row. This type of roster provides practically no opportunity for a trip to Europe, USA or elsewhere. So do dream-on if you think you can join flydubai and get regular trips home outside of your leave periods.
Speaking of leave. Whilst bids for leave need to be submitted many months in advance, the crews are only informed if their leave has been granted when it is just weeks or days away. Booking tickets or trying to avail of staff travel, with Emirates or any other airline, at short notice is then not the easiest, or cheapest, or most guaranteed of travel options.
Many crew have had leave forced upon them, forcing them to use their leave allocation when they did not want to and thus disrupting their plans for leave later in the year, which always assumes that flydubai does not keep pulling the same ‘forced leave’ stunt time after time throughout the year, though they might be in breach of Article 76 of UAE Employment Law if they did that?!
They get no wrap around days either side of their leave days.
They get no early finish or late start duties around days off or leave, in fact just the opposite!
Their rosters are published only a few days before they are due to start.
They have no formal facility to provide a ‘requested day off’ in advance of a published roster. If they need a certain day off they can sometimes, though not always, achieve it by bothering Crewing to see if they can get a duty swap with someone else, and even then only two duty swaps are allowed per active roster.
They only get paper rosters. They have no ability to see their roster or request a duty swap via the internet.
They get lots of standby and reserve duties, for which they do not get paid as might be the case in the USA.
It is probably true to say that these shortcomings are not the fault of the Rostering department, as it is likely that they are only following orders handed down to them from those higher-up the chain of command.