Avionics News October 2013 - 69

AVIATION’S ILLUMINATING REVOLUTION
Continued from page 23

versus short-term cheap.
A well-thought-out package of upgrades
could keep an owner returning for progressive overhauls of the ﬂeet’s ﬂight status.
Shops can help themselves help operators by surveying the lights on the
plane and tallying the power they consume and their individual replacement
costs. If the log entries show them,
looking back at replacement entries
can help a shop project the timeline for
the existing bulb’s life expectancies.
Pilots we know began their migration to full use of LEDs by starting
with the most-troublesome of their
existing lights: landing/taxi lights and
panel post lights.
These are units dealers can sell operators for their own installation under
operator-performed maintenance rules

in the Federal Aviation Regulations.
Replacing other lights may entail
work that requires credentials and signoffs, particularly anything replaced
under a supplemental type certiﬁcate.
After landing/taxi lights and post
lights, the direction to go should be that
direction suitable for the owner. This
may be LED position/strobe lights for
someone facing replacement of existing
units; it may be replacing a stand-alone
anti-collision light with a new life-ofthe-airplane LED equivalent.
It may be inside, where other lights
are due for replacement.
One operator said his aircraft is
halfway through being transitioned to
all-LED lighting following a simple
formula: watching for mark-down pricing on units and following through by
chasing the lowest-cost path.
“By the time I’m done, there will
be lower cost replacements for every-

thing,” the pilot said. “With luck, the
end of the process will end my need
to ever again replace a landing light
or strobe head. And that will put me
money ahead in the long run.”
For many operators, a similar approach will make imminent sense and
improve the quality of aircraft ownership in the long term.
“The advantages of LED technology in aircraft lighting include a signiﬁcantly longer lifetime, lower power
consumption, lower maintenance effort, constant and uniform light output,
higher reliability, and high resistance
to shock and vibration,” said Dennis
Scannell, marketing communications
specialist with UTC Aerospace Systems. “State-of-the-art exterior LED
lighting products today feature at least
the same or even better light output
and brightness than previous HID
products.” q

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Instruments and Avionics.
Velocity Aerospace - Ft. Lauderdale
5352 NW 21st Terrace
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33309
www.velocityaerospace.com

Tel: 800/422-4559 or 954/772-4559
Fax: 954/493-8960
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Avionics News October 2013

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