Avionics News August 2012 - 22

LIGHTENING THE LOAD
Continued from page 21

fraction of the power of the incandescent standards. Installing any of them should present few, if any, challenges greater than those posed by replacing the same incandescent bulbs or fixtures, thanks to engineers designing virtually all available offerings as simple drop-in replacements. LED fixtures are largely self-contained, another benefit since LED-based strobe packs need no remote power packs. This makes adding or upgrading to new anti-collision or strobe lights easier. The largest factor working against such a changeover is cost. Today, LED options cost more than the conventional units they’re designed to replace, whether landing or taxi lights, strobe or flashing anti-collision units, navigation- and recognition-light fixtures. However, costs are progressively dropping. LED packs lend themselves to a phased changeover, allowing aircraft owners and operators to adapt as budgets allow. Dealers and shops should convey to aircraft owners the longterm costs of sticking with the old technology, especially when recommending an upgrade to the aircraft lighting. The same goes for the costs of repeated replacement of morefragile bulbs and light fixtures plus, in some cases, labor costs. Changeover momentum is gaining, and product production and development are in full swing. Just as many aircraft makers already deliver their products with LED units in all lighting roles, the shift in general aviation piston aircraft also is underway for all lighting needs. Consider these options for lighting the way on less power.

Landing Lights: A Longer-Term Solution for Night Ops No light source serves up more aggravation and irritation for aircraft owners and maintenance technicians than incandescent aircraft landing lights. A number of pilots buy these units – typically the GE 4509 – a dozen at a time. Most of these pilots always carry at least one spare in their aircraft – two if the model uses two landing lights or some other landing/taxi mix. While halogen replacements require about half the power to produce the same light, the higher costs don’t always endear them to owners because their longevity doesn’t always match the price. Today’s aircraft owner enjoys multiple options for using modern LED units, and all require even less power than the halogen bulb but produce more light. Any cost-benefit analysis of these replacements should be calculated against the life expectancies – rated for 5,000 hours and up. That’s 5,000 hours of under-power time, not 5,000 hours on the airframe. So, imagine the years of uninterrupted use one can expect from an LED landing light. Having experienced both incandescent and halogen landing lights fail in less than 20 hours of use – and having had to replace tough-to-access recessed wingtip-mounted bulbs – the option to pay more to never face that task again outweighs whatever a cost-benefit analysis might show. Enter EMTEQ’s LED Exterior-Light Products In 2008, this advanced-technology company unveiled what it calls the industry’s first chip-on-board red LED anti-collision

SNAPSHOT: Cost/Benefit Calculus
In the real world of the most-common GE4509 landing-light bulb, a 100-watt unit, the need to replace tends to come around every 25 to 35 hours – or every 40 to 50 landings. For the pilot flying 100 hours a year, that adds up to a lot of $30 bulbs, plus labor or owner time making the swap. One of the compatible drop-in replacements boasts a meantime between failures in the thousands of hours. Every time an LED surpasses a subsequent replacement time of an old light, the long-term value of the technology increases. Few pilots outside the professional-flyer ranks would ever see enough time in a small plane to experience both the installation and replacement of an LED landinglight replacement. However, many pilots will enjoy the benefits of making the change to LEDs whether they do one or all of the outside lights – and as many as possible inside. Strobe and beacon based on LEDs come closer to being justifiable on the basis of one swap, and recognition/position lights keep dropping, bringing them evercloser to price parity with incandescent units. This is after just four years of rapid change. Imagine how much closer pricing should be in another five. q

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august

2012

Avionics News August 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Avionics News August 2012