Toastal: The flydubai Command upgrade process is necessarily rigorous. It is a process which is not to be underestimated, or taken as a 'right', and just because someone has such & such hours, or has been in the company for certain period, does not guarantee a pass, as some F/O's have found out!
flydubais original order was for 50 aircraft and so far they have taken delivery of 30 of those. That said, the initial 2 aircraft were (sub)leased out of the fleet in 2011 - which means that, today, flydubai operates a fleet of 28 aircraft. Now depending upon how you slice it up, and assuming that no more aircraft are ordered, that leaves either 20 or 22 aircraft still yet to be delivered from that initial order.
By my reckoning there are presently 150 First Officers already in flydubai. If, say, 6x F/O's are required to upgrade, in order to supply enough Captains for each additional new aircraft, that means that there are already enough F/O's in place to fulfil the Command requirement for all the aircraft yet to be delivered from that initial order, and if flydubai take on Direct Entry Captains it would only make matters worse for F/O upgrades! Now unless something changes, eg. a lot of Captains decide to leave, or flydubai order more aircraft, or a lot of the present F/O's fail their upgrade, any new-join F/O can expect to sit a very long time in the RHS. And the longer you leave it to join, the worse it gets.
It is suggested that flydubai will take 6 new aircraft this year (2013) and which would require, say, 36 F/O's to be upgraded to Captain in order to crew these aircraft in the LHS - which leaves approx 114 F/O's still waiting for their chance.
There will, inevitably, come a point when new-hire F/O's are effectively seat-locked by a lack of growth in the company and or lack of leavers from the LHS, and it might be said that that point has already been reached?!
Just do the math !