by tdammers » Sun Mar 10, 2019 5:09 pm
See above. It's a known FG bug. The URL to fetch METAR from is hard-coded, and it's an HTTP address - but NOAA, who run the METAR service we use, have stopped supporting HTTP, forcing HTTPS on all connections, so the hard-coded URL doesn't work anymore. The only clean way to fix this is to patch your FG, at least until a binary release of a fixed version becomes available.
If you built FG from source, the patch is easy - just grep for `noaa.gov` in the codebase, which should show the places where the noaa URL appears (2 places IIRC), and then you just change the "http" in those to "https", rebuild, install, and that's it.
With that fix in place, FG should get METAR for the nearest location(s), and interpolate as appropriate. However, it is possible to not get anything at times, e.g. because of network errors, because the NOAA METAR service is down, or because there simply isn't anything suitable nearby.