Like the title says, my Rasp Pi FlightAware ADS-B setup died Saturday morning.  I got an email from FlightAware saying my station was no longer inputting data into the system.  Checked it out, and sure enough, the Rasp Pi was dead.  It's normally on 24/7, and I use it all the time on my notebook while setting on the back patio late at night watching the FedEx planes land at Indianapolis International.  Near as I can tell, the Rasp Pi must have gotten a surge from the power supply and the Micro SD card with the program got corrupted.  Amazon to the rescue!  Ordered a new Rasp Pi model 3 B+ and had it delivered with Prime same day free shipping.  The original SD card would not work in the new Pi, (why I assumed it was corrupted), so DL'd new program from FlightAware and had everything back running last night.

Glad you were able to get it back up and running!

Your post reminded me to check and make sure mine was still running

Are you sure the Pi itself is dead?

I've had SD cards self-corrupt in my Pi's twice, I think just from the card aging.

SSDs have hardware in them that monitors and rewrites data before it gets corrupted, and
I don't think the SD cards (or at least older ones) do this.

I don't feed anything into the sites, but sometimes I'll run dump1090 on mine just to
watch the FBI spy planes stick out like a sore thumb.

The website has been DOA on my computer for about three weeks now. I thought a Firefox update killed it but it's not working on Chrome either. The map loads but shows no aircraft.

Apps that constantly write to storage will definitely age an SD card out quickly.

Ideal situation is boot, read config files, load programs to RAM, and don't touch the SD card until shutdown.

I'm not sure what logging flightaware has, but if you can set it to disable local writing to a log file that should help with SD card corruption.

Alternatively - You could try mounting a small laptop sized spinning HDD or SSD for flightaware related storage / swap / etc.

You know, I tried the original SD card in the new Pi with no joy, but not the new SD card with the freshly DL'd program in the original Pi.  I'll try that.

To add to TinLeg's suggestion, on my flash-based systems that run linux I
put /tmp on a ram-based tmpfs filesystem in /etc/fstab:



This can be done with other directories that don't need to be persistent
as well. (Just change the mount point.)

This greatly reduces the write activity on the card.

I recommend a better antenna.

For my long term raspberry pi's I have moved them to usb sticks. I have yet to have a single one fail since converting. I keep a couple of pi's for development using the sd cards but everything else is usb boot.