Breaking: FlyDubai 737 Crashes In Russia, Killing All 55 Onboard

This does not sound good https://www.rt.com/news/336514-flydubai-pilots-fatigue-crash/

Crews being afraid to call in sick etc, don't sound good. Vortex Thing Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Emirates Living - The Meadows Age: 44 Posts: 358 To be fair tatelyle was just being sarcastic. Its a bit like saying that all airlines are like FR. They aren't. I have flown for enough airlines to know that some have a culture that is like FZ and most though unlikely to be awarded medals for being touchy feely are nothing like FZ. FZ is a special type of management. In FR everyone is treated badly and equally badly but it isn't closeted. You know how it is when you join, it doesn't change when you are there or when you have left. There were few surprises. However the treatment isn't personal it is generally just a lack of flexibility, due diligence or care for you and yours. However FZ sells itself as something different, it says all the right things to all the right people but poke even a millimetre under the veneer and you find cabin crew so terrified of calling sick that they go to work when they should be in hospital. Back home in Europe you don't have the chance of your family being stuck with their visa cancelled and or going to jail for a debt incurred by the necessity to have a place to live and school fees to pay upfront. Therefore the fact that you may be treated badly is just an annoyance. In FZ it could cost you your liberty and worse yet it doesn't matter if you are innocent, guilty or otherwise. If JV or KG take umbrage with you, you are done. Basically JV could be found standing over the body with a smoking gun in his hand. He would say it was your fault for discovering him about to clean it and blame you for startling him. He would then stop paying you so that you couldn't testify otherwise just to make sure. He's a nice guy like that. FZ makes FR look like Virgin! Vortex Thing is offline

Some interesting reading over at PPrune Vortex Thing Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Emirates Living - The Meadows Age: 44 Posts: 355 For the love of god!!! The 2 hours holding is standard FDB operations. We are routinely sent to somewhere we knew we couldn't get into with little prospect of being able to get into it with boatloads of fuel and told give it a go. If you didn't then you came under the scrutiny of the chief pilot who had a penchant for bullying crew and making careers untenable. 9/10 times we would do just that fly 3/4/5hrs get their hold have a look try again if necessary and more times that not we would divert. The route they were flying was not one that more senior pilots would ever pick as it is known for crap weather, is captain only landing and its dark o'clock. It was just one of those places that you hoped to not get on your roster and if you did and if you couldn't swap it then you hoped you had one of those nights where there was a break in the crap weather and you could get in. If not you rocked up with extra stuff as you knew you could easily end up in a hotel. FDB heap commercial pressure on crews way past the normal anyone else but if you have your family stuck in the middle east you have a choice do what they ask be it carry lithium batteries, operate outside of FTLs, ignore assaults on crew etc or loose your job and possibly your career. It wasn't that we didn't know that but most of us just took the money and hoped to not be the crew of FZ981 before we got either enough money/hours/experience in LHS, etc to move to somewhere else. The chief pilots favourite saying is "if you don't like it leave!" it was his solution to every problem given and the culture of fear has eroded the culture of safety to such an extent that most pilots were unlikely torpor anything but the most serious incidents as they knew they were simply raising their heads above the parapet. Re the numerous posts from experts on here who have not operated in the Middle east, who have not flown in Russian airspace and who do not know anything about HGS/HUD ops suggest you use the two ears more than the one mouth and though of course you are interested but your conjecture does nothing to help do anything other than muddy the waters. FDB never ever do coupled approaches. All CAT3a, CAT2 and CAT1 are manually flown to the ground. All low vis is hand flown. All low vis is hand flown on the HGS. All approaches in Russia are flown on QNH we have LIDO tables with a conversion table on EVRY Plate. If you find a pilot in FZ unfamiliar with flying in metres and getting wind in metres per second then they are very very new indeed. There would have been little to no confusion in the crews mind about altimeter settings, when to set or change and wind in mps as it is an almost every day occurrence in Russia and we have/had 18 routes to Russia which is pretty significant. What happened, I have a guess the same as any other pilot and more so with other 737 pilots and even more so with 737NG pilots. The factors are facts and everything else at this stage is clearly conjecture. Did they make and error in the GA, was their catastrophic failure of something or other, was it an act of god? That will all come out pretty soon. What isn't conjecture however is that colleagues are dead and the weather was crap on departure, estimated to be crap at ETA, estimated to be crap until way past the point of full tanks and they left with the FDB standard cunning plan of well maybe it will be okay. If you want a fact it is that not many airlines would consider that normal they would simply wait at base until it was at least predicted to be likely and then leave. FZ don't do that why? ask the Chief Pilot. He as an uber pilot and uber human knows better than everyone else he evens knows that black is in fact white and can prove it when called upon to do so and is above the law as demonstrated on innumerous occasions. So yes whilst of course factors such as starting a new job etc would have been a factor the reality is FDB take 7 days minimum to sort your visa out when you leave and frequently take longer because we the crew do not matter, were not humans are simply slaves to be abused at their whim so why would looking after us or our families matter. So yes these factors exist but lets be honest we have all heard the tape. They called the GA and did it so the why were they there and why wait so long is simple, that is what NCC demanded they do. Why because the Chief Pilot lets them do whatever they please and refuses to exert any control over what is directly his area of responsibility because nothing is important except his pay check. I hope the money is worth it and I hope the families of the departed get to see him face to face, look him in the eye in the full knowledge of how he runs his ship. ********* what-to-do Join Date: Aug 2012 Location: Dubai Posts: 106 Vortex Thing has it pretty much spot on. The flight was loaded with maximum fuel, allowing 6 tons of tankering fuel. This equated to roughly 2 hours of holding time, which fits nicely with the reported facts. This would have been arranged by the company (NCC). The mantra here at flydubai is to hold as long as possible, whatever the weather, in the hope that there will a window of opportunity to land. The company would rather spend money holding than diverting/ delaying or even cancelling a flight. The captain had indeed been offered a job with Ryanair, but was not leaving on Monday (as suggested). I understand he was due to start with Ryanair in April. I also understand that the captain flew to India the previous night, another long night flight. Whilst I cannot say that fatigue was an issue, he would have certainly been tired. If, like me, you are unable to get an appropriate amount of sleep post a night flight, the next night flight is that much harder. All one has to do is go through the Flydubai thread on the middle east thread and read all the posts regarding fatigue and rostering. You will see that fatigue has been an issue for a few years now, something that the safety department is powerless to do anything about. Flydubai lost appx 80 pilots last year alone. The primary reason for the resignations was rostering, as the level of fatigue was simply unmanageable for some. I also understand that we had 21 resignations in January alone. Each month, a safety bulletin is released detailing most of the ASR's for that period. You would be amazed at the amount of fatigue reports submitted. It is truly frightening that an airline can operate with such an unsafe rostering culture. I have no wish to speculate as to the cause of the crash, I will leave that to the investigation. However, IF fatigue is found as a contributing factor, I can honestly say that I am not surprised. I am just so sad that so many people lost their lives that night and that the investigation is swift and thorough. Flydubai will never be the same again. what-to-do is online now

10 minutes before Flydubai Flight 981 was cleared for its first attempt to land, S7 Airlines Flight 1159 and Ural Airlines Flight 2758 landed successfully at Rostov-on-Don Airport. 12 minutes after Flydubai Flight 981's first aborted landing after which it went into a holding pattern, Aeroflot Flight 1166 from Moscow Sheremetyevo made the first of three unsuccessful attempts to land at Rostov-on-Don Airport within the next 35 minutes before diverting to the nearby Krasnodar Airport, landing successfully there. Rostov-on-Don is NOT the easiest airport to land at on an ordinary day. Pilots are advised on their charts when landing at Rostov-on-Don Airport to expect severe turbulence and possible windshear in the final moments before touchdown. It may have been the first time the pilot has been to the Rostov-on-Don Airport. After the first attempt was aborted, the pilot flew in a holding pattern over Rostov-on-Don Airport, having circled the Rostov-on-Don Airport 10 times before attempting to land for a second time, since landings in non-designated airports are usually not welcomed by the airline management. Holding for 2 hours is ridiculous, if Flydubai policy was dictating that then I'll never fly with Flydubai. Flydubai should have diverted after maximum 30 mins holding. The pilot could have been tired after circling over Rostov-on-Don Airport for several hours after midnight. The pilot has flown at least three different circles trying to reorient to the runway - possibly due to"disorientation". According to ATC communications published online, before the Flydubai Flight 981 was established on the localiser- the instrument which indicates the center line of the runway when pilot is landing using instruments rather than visually, pilot reported to ATC that in case he would need to make another go-around, he would climb to flight level 80 (2,400 m). The pilot then reported that he was established on the localiser and continued his descent. At 5.5 km before the runway threshold, when the Flydubai Flight 981 was at 450 m, it started climbing again. ATC records appeared to show that Flydubai Flight 981was going around moments before it crashed. The pilot reported his intention to abort the landing with "Going around, Skydubai 981". ATC advised Flydubai Flight 981 to switch to another air traffic controller ("Skydubai 981, contact Rostov Radar on 121.2"). Flydubai Flight 981 acknowledged this with "121.2, bye-bye", which was its final transmission. After aborting its second approach, at an altitude of 1,230 m, Flydubai Flight 981 began a rapid descent with a vertical speed reaching more than 105 m/s and crashed and completely disintegrated about 250m short of the runway. The ball of ignited kerosine confirmed that the Flydubai Flight 981did NOT run out fuel. Changing the "pilot flying" (PF) and "pilot monitoring" (PM) roles after the first missed approach has the advantage of the second approach being conducted by a “fresh” set of hands and mitigates the effect of the tunnel vision that often occurs after failed to land at the first attempt. Raw data from FR24 shows the aircraft going from a 20 m/s climb to roughly a 30m/s dive within about 5 seconds. Vertical speed of over 100 m/s. If the site data is actually correct, the climb rate seems a little bit high. The pilots completely lost control during the go around and for some reason could NOT not arrest a very-steep descent. A Boeing 737-800 "pilot flying" (PF) could inadvertently apply pressure to the control column, trip the auto flight system into CWS (Control Wheel Steering), without noticing and the pilot's continued pressure on the stick could result in >20 degree dive. A manually flown go-around in night / Instrument meteorological conditions and light weight can produce an inner ear acceleration illusion known as somatogravic/vestibular illusion. Longitudinal acceleration can be falsely sensed by a pilot as an extreme pitch-up. The sensation can be overwhelming and cause a pilot to ignore other sensory inputs, forcing the aircraft into a dive. This was a cause factor in the Gulf Air Flight 072 – Airbus A320 accident in Bahrain almost 16 years ago, the Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771-Airbus A330 crash in Tripoli almost 6 years ago and the Tatarstan Airlines Flight 363-Boeing 737-500 crash in Kazan 2 years ago. Similarly several US military jets were also lost during the early days of jet aircraft catapult launches from US aircraft carriers. Since instinct to push during the acceleration is uncontrollable, it is very important to have the right hand OFF the "joy-stick" during the launch. More than 12,000 US Navy aircraft were lost including the aircrafts lost in combat, but most of them were lost in just attempting to take off and land on an aircraft carrier.

The aircraft crashed on the freakin runway. So it was in the initial stages of a go around after a missed localizer approach to runway 22. Likely a stall due to pilot error or icing. The black box airspeed and attitude readings will tell the tale.