In March 2016, Flydubai flight 981 crashed while attempting to land in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, resulting in the deaths of all 62 people on board. The incident has remained a subject of intense aviation scrutiny due to the aircraft's sudden, near-vertical descent from an altitude of approximately 17,000 feet. Recently, a flight instructor conducted a simulation to replicate the final moments of the flight, attempting to visualize the cockpit experience and the mechanical forces acting upon the Boeing 737-800.

While official investigations have previously pointed to pilot error and adverse weather conditions as primary factors, the simulation serves as a technical exercise to understand how such a rapid loss of altitude occurs in a commercial jet. The simulator recreation highlights the extreme difficulty pilots face when recovering from a nose-down attitude at low altitudes. Aviation experts often use such recreations to bridge the gap between raw flight data recorder information and the physical reality of the flight deck. By visualizing the descent, analysts can better explain why the aircraft entered a dive from which it could not recover. The simulation does not introduce new evidence regarding the cause of the crash but provides a visual representation of the flight path data that has been public since the investigation concluded.