The pilot of the FlyDubai jet which crashed in Russia on Saturday, killing all 62 people on board, had resigned due to an unbearable schedule, according to a Russian media outlet.
Fight FZ981 was one of the last flights Cypriot Aristos Sokratous, 37, was due to fly for the low cost airline.
He is said to have been hired by Ryanair and was set to return to Cyprus within the next few weeks.
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The pilot of the FlyDubai jet which crashed in Russia on Saturday, killing all 62 people on board, had resigned due to an unbearable schedule, according to a Russian media outlet
Russian Emergency Ministry employees investigate the wreckage of a crashed plane at the Rostov-on-Don airport, about 600 miles south of Moscow, Russia on Sunday
'The reason that the captain was resigning is because of the schedules, he just couldn't do it anymore,' an anonymous former FlyDubai captain revealed to RT.
'He was too tired, going to work fatigued, and that is actually why he had resigned.'
The whistleblower said he personally had been 'worked to death' by the airline and fellow pilots are not given enough time to sleep between flights.
According to the Cyprus Mail, he blamed sleep deprivation as a contributing cause of the FZ981 crash in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
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Share 42 sharesJunior pilots in particular are regularly given multiple flight shifts in a row with little time for sleep readjustment, he is reported as saying.
Referring to an internal survey conducted by FlyDubai, the informant said that 80 per cent of his colleagues had predicted the possibility of a crash due to exhaustion.
'It's unbelievable, I mean they knew this was coming, they absolutely knew it and of course they will blame it on the pilots,' he said.
Emergencies Ministry members work at the crash site of a Boeing 737-800 Flight FZ981 operated by Dubai-based budget carrier FlyDubai
The news outlet said they had obtained the flight log of co-captain, Alejandro Cruz Alava, which showed he had worked 11 days straight with only one day off prior to the crash.
Sokratous had 5,900 hours experience as a pilot and it is understood he was at the controls of the aircraft, while is Spanish first officer Alejandro Alava, 37, who had 5,700 hours flight time, was in charge of keeping in contact with Air Traffic Control.
Sokratous was promoted to captain 18 months ago, according to the friend.
He had previously worked for Helios Airways, the Cypriot airline that shut down following a crash in 2005 that killed 121 people.
A view of the runway at the Rostov-on-Don airport where a FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 crashed
The cause of the crash is not known but several planes had trouble landing at the airport due to strong winds at the time of the crash.
Most of the passengers were Russian holiday-makers.
The budget carrier FlyDubai launched in 2009, with a network of up to 90 destinations. They operate more than 1,700 flights each week.
Its Facebook page says: 'From our hub in Dubai, we strive to remove barriers to travel and enhance connectivity between different cultures across our ever-expanding network.
'Our agility and flexibility as a young airline has enhanced Dubai's economic development, in line with the Government of Dubai's vision, by creating trade and tourism flows in previously under-served markets.'
RT said they had obtained the flight log of co-captain, Alejandro Cruz Alava which showed he had worked 11 days straight with only one day off prior to the crash
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