Update: projectFLY is now funded and back online. This also means the other sites including PTA are available again.
Yesterday, numerous websites under the Mettar Simulations umbrella appeared offline. This includes the popular virtual aviation online tool projectFLY, Mettarsim and also SimTweaks / PTA. As of today, the only website online is projectFLY.co.uk.
This is the third occurrence in the past three months in which these websites have gone offline or suffered outages. Back in October, it was confirmed by Matt Davies that due to a lack of funds, and high server costs, Google had shut down their servers until the bills were paid. The community then stepped up and support the projects and soon enough, services resumed.
In November, it was claimed that projectFLY was being “attacked“. Services were restored shortly afterwards. It was then said that once V4 of projectFLY is released, then it would solve the issues as there would be more paid tiers and options. Matt confirmed that they were aiming for a release of December 8th 2019. Currently, a new splash screen sits on the main projectFLY domain saying that “we’re upgrading.” No time frame is currently given.
projectFLY isn’t the only service currently unavailable to the community under the Mettar brand. Simtweaks, which publishes the PTA tool, is also unable to be used. Those that paid for the product currently cannot access the download. According to various AVSIM forum members, the 24-hour outage has also meant that they are unable to activate their product when wishing to use the tool. Why this outage is occurring is not clear. Back in October, it was made clear that Simtweaks / PTA would no longer be impacted by a projectFLY outage. Whilst there’s no evidence that they are linked, it’s hard to imagine this is purely coincidental.
We then contacted projectFLY via their Facebook page to receive comment. We did this to get answers for the community who were begging for answers after 24-hours of silence (aside from “we are working on it” type posts) This is the message we sent to the projectFLY page.
We hid some personal information from the screenshot above. Nothing else edited.
After this message sent, an update statement from Matt Davies was released on Facebook. In regards to projectFLY v4, it is “essentially complete.” The team are awaiting on a green light from the dispatcher partners, AviationCloud. They are away on business, which wasn’t communicated to Matt.
It is also confirmed that the Google Cloud Platform account has unpaid bills. What this means is that until those costs are cleared, no data can be migrated from Google Cloud to their new infrastructure. As a result, Matt is once again asking the community to donate more money to projectFLY. Only once the server costs are covered, can Matt then migrate the data over to projectFLY V4. Until then, no projectFLY and no projectFLY V4. They are keeping a record of everyone who has supported (along with their donation amount) and will be in touch with a “small, but hopefully meaningful way of saying thank you.” Should you wish to donate, you can do so here.
He did say that once they have moved to the new infrastructure, it will be faster and cheaper.
What this update fails to mention is users of PTA and how they can download and activate their products.
As always, we’ll follow the story and report to the community.
