Landing /Taxi light

[guccidude1]

Some unverified info. I was at a lighting store yesterday and the owner said a good "rule of thumb" when comparing lumens to watts on light bulbs is a16:1 ratio. 16 lumens roughly equals 1 watt in light output. Again, unverified but problably is in the ballpark. Dan

[JonJay]

Originally Posted by guccidude1

Some unverified info. I was at a lighting store yesterday and the owner said a good "rule of thumb" when comparing lumens to watts on light bulbs is a16:1 ratio. 16 lumens roughly equals 1 watt in light output. Again, unverified but problably is in the ballpark. Dan

Not even close. Maybe for some incandescent light bulbs. We are seeing commercial LED sources exceeding 100 lumens per watt, which is close to what fluorescent sources have been for some time and HID.
As Dean mentioned, don't get hung up on raw lumens. It is all about what you can get at the task. That is all you care about.
There are a lot of factors to evaluate if you are considering LED landing lights. As an example the Rigid guys have a lot of raw lumens, but they also state a 25,000 hour life. If we can find out what LED they are using we could then get a lab test graph from the LED manufacturer and determine if they are overdriving the LED leading to the short life, which is what I expect they are doing to push out more raw lumens. That only tells us what it did in the controlled conditions of a lab. Also, what will it do when we stuff it in a wing and put a lens over it?
If you want to be able to make a true comparison, the LED landing light companies need to start testing to a uniform standard like is done in commercial lighting. LM79 is the testing standard we use. They can then adopt a life and lumen depreciation standard like L80. (Life is established it reaches 80% lumen output.)
As I side note, I just saw a new LED troffer 50,000 hours at L95 and 100,000 hours at L87. That is it will still produce 87% of its lumens at 100,000 hours. You can trust it will as it was tested according to LM79.

[Alex_K]

I use this




You can see these lights in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=0QG3KhN4Y78

[Dean_aeroleds]

That is a Teledyne PAR36. The Teledyne consumes 45W just like our Sunspot 36, and puts out about the same number of lumens (1500), but is not as tightly focused as the Sunspot (lower peak candela).

The Paremetheus is a 17W PAR36 light that puts out about 600 lumens with a tight beam. Lumens are measured by shining the beam into an integrating sphere that is calibrated to measure total lumens.

Lumens is the total amount of light produced, candela is the intensity of the light in a specific direction and is calculated by Candela = Lumens/steradian where steradian is a unit of solid angle.

We have a demo setup that we take to trade shows that has a Q4509 bulb, a Teledyne, a Parmetheus, a Sunspot 36, and a 35W HID mounted side by side so that we can show the comparison between the different lights by shining them on the ceiling. This lets people see the relative intensities and beam widths.

Originally Posted by Alex_K

I use this




You can see these lights in action here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=0QG3KhN4Y78

[Alex_K]

Originally Posted by Dean_aeroleds

That is a Teledyne PAR36. The Teledyne consumes 45W

Exactly!

[cyrus]

I know there's a lot of other people interested in the differences or advantages in LED lighting, I've been sort of obsessing as of late. The cost is quite a bit higher than HID, and we're all looking at ways to justify the upgrade. Thought this was an interesting article.

http://www.malibuaerospace.com/sitepages/pid73.php

Still, wishing there was an affordable kit that would replace my DW halogen with a "brilliant" LED setup. Something equivalent to a 55w HID. I talked to Richard at DW about the possibility of using two of his led lights side by side and he also thought about this, but didn't think it would be desirable. Anybody have thoughts, input or suggestions on how to get affordably (under $200) get usable 2k-3k lumens, vs raw lumens.

[Dean_aeroleds]

Here are some photos of our new Sunspot 46 in an L-39 wingtip:
http://classicjets.org/forum/viewtop...?t=1783&p=5997

[roee]

I have a pair of Rigid R+ lights that I picked up last year at Oshkosh. They appear to be well designed and well built. They project a well behaved beam pattern, and are unbelievably bright.

Unfortunately, I never got a chance to see a direct side-by-side comparison in action of the Rigid R+ next to comparable products from AeroLEDs (most direct comp: Sunspot 36LX). Doing that Pepsi challenge would have been ideal. But short of that, my impressions from seeing both individually are that both are excellent products, but qualitatively the illumination field (intensity, peak and distribution) cast by the Rigid was at least as good if not better, and the Rigid was substantially less expensive than the AeroLEDs (similar list price, but the Rigid guys were willing to haggle, the AeroLEDs guys were not).

As for AeroLEDs, as I've said, I've been impressed by their product offerings, and I give them credit for being a pioneer in this niche. But I'm glad they're finally encountering some serious competition. Hopefully that'll drive further improvement of the product, and drive the prices down.

[Dorfie]

Originally Posted by polishpilot

Vans also sell their RV10 LED Landing Light kit. They fit well into the RV9 wingtips. A slight adjustment is made when installing.

Can you point me to this RV10 LED landing light plse?
I cannot find it on the Vans website.
Thanks.
johan

[TCONROY]

Last week I was holding short of the runway at KUAO and the Van's demonstrator RV-9A was on a 3 mile final. Before I could see the airplane, I saw the incredibly bright leading edge landing lights. I've seen many other RV's come into Aurora with the halogens and they are barely noticeable during the daytime. So this week I installed two AeroLED Sunspot 36LX landing lights to replace the Duckworks 100w halogen bulbs in our RV-7. WOW!! They are unbelievably bright!!! I can hardly look directly at them from 25ft without squinting. We don't fly at night much, but we are in a busy area and I wanted better anti-collision visibility. It's also nice that the LED's draw less than 1/4 of the current the halogens were drawing on the electrical system. We have the VP-X programmed to wig-wag above 100kias which I also really like.