Mettar Simulations, the brand behind the incredibly popular projectFLY flight tracking addon, has released their 4th quarter update following on from one released in June.

Founder and CEO Matt Davies begins with a short recap on the events of the last few months, beginning with news that the company had parted ways with their previous investor, who left Mettar Simulations in a precarious spot financially. This meant the team wasn't able to deliver on the initial projectFLY version 4 release estimate of "a few weeks" after FlightSimExpo 2019.

To keep projectFLY's 'lights on', Davies sent out a donation pledge email in July, though he says they were unable to cover running costs at that time. Outstanding bills in August and September forced Google, the host of projectFLY, to suspend their servers.

"To say I was crushed was an understatement. I genuinely thought that was it.

"I made a post on Facebook explaining the situation. Initially, it was to just explain what was going on, I didn't ask for donations, I didn't ask for help, I just simply explained what was going on.

"I assumed because my previous email hadn't worked, that there wasn't enough people either interested/able to help support projectFLY financially, so I didn't even think of setting up a donation page."

An outswelling of support followed, giving projectFLY the financial support it needed within 15 hours of the service being temporarily terminated. Davies expresses his deepest thanks to those who donated, saying that the company no longers needs an investor due to this.

Turning to the future, the popular Twitch streamer said that version 4 of projectFLY must be released before mid-December due to billing issues in order to maintain continuous operation. The self imposed deadline means that v4 will be released within 30 days.

In terms of actual progress, the team have been working through beta builds currently, which will be cleared in the next week. New previews of version 4 were also released:

Davies maintains that Mettar's other projects, which include PTA, Simstall and an A380 are still active despite a lack of news recently.

You can see the full post on the Mettar Simulations website.