New Landing light, 4,500 Lumens BRIGHT!

[ron sterba]

Hey Jerry I found it,It wasn't the 1600 lumen round. If you need just one LED landing light combo taxi I found it at Rigid Indusries. It has 12 LEDs and rated at four thousand five hundred lumens !!!!!!!!! This model E2-4" Driving, draws 3.26 amps so I can still use my 16awg wire, (45watts ). Has very nice light pattern. My observation is centralized spot beam of 4 LEDs and then 4 LEDs each side of spot for horizontal light pattern. It does a fantastic job! Best light I seen come along. Used the Ductworth landing light cut out but had to make my own mounting bracket between the last two wing ribs in my RV9A.Finally something worth getting for safety reasons. I have one rectangular auto headlamp on the right wing.when it blows it goes! Hope it helps.
Ron

[mchargmg]

Ron,

Very cool, is this the one?

http://www.rigidindustries.com/led-lighting/17361

[Dean_aeroleds]

Raw lumens (LED datasheet lumens) or beam lumens (taking into account thermal effects and optics losses)?

The AeroLEDs Aerosun has 12 LEDs and draws 3 Amps for 36 Watts of power. If I use the raw lumens from the LED datasheet, I can claim 3250 raw lumens. That doesn't necessarily mean that is what you wind up with in the beam.

You might want to inquire how they came up with their lumen number. The best way to measure lumens from a light is with an integrating sphere that captures the light emitted from the light and measures the total lumen output.

[flyboy1963]

all these new LED's sound great, but what's the deal with turning all this energy into light?
Burying this in your wing, where's the cooling airflow coming from?
sounds like there would be some heat from the transformers or what have you, if not the lights themselves?

[JonJay]

The enemy of LED's is heat. LED's produce a lot of it at the junction. This heat has to be dissipated through a proper heat sink.
Most LED drivers do not produce a lot of heat, however, as any electronic component, they need to be kept within tolerance.

The key to LED's efficiency is they are a very tiny point source. When they are coupled with a properly designed optic, you can put the light where you want it to do the work you want it too.

This is why lumen output in commercial lighting is defined as "delivered lumens", the amount of light actually getting out of the optic. The optic in our airplane would not just be the "lamp" itself, but all of the components of the system including the lens in the wing.

For this application, what is important is center beam lumens and the lumens delivered within the beam that is actually working for us as we try to find the runway.

Avoid products that only list lumen output of the LED's.

[Bavafa]

Yet my Trustfire flash light modified for landing light provides a lot of light for the same amount of Amp draw. They claim 11000LM and I don?t know how inaccurate that claim is but it is far brighter than my Xanon lights and far cheaper than most if not all other landing lights. So far so good, zero RF noise and have been functioning flawlessly for the last year that they have been installed.

[Krynn]

Originally Posted by JonJay

The enemy of LED's is heat. [SNIP] Avoid products that only list lumen output of the LED's.

For what it's worth, Rigid products are very popular in the offroad world, where they're expected to work for hours on end after being caked with mud. I don't think the lack of airflow from being inside a wing is going to bother them all that much.

As for the light output, they list raw lumens, lux at 10 meters, distance (in meters) at 1 lux, and peak candela (all measured via the ANSI/NEMA FL Standard). Finding the beam angles is a bit more difficult... After a bit of digging, I've found that for the E2 series the "hyperspot" is a 5? cone, the spot is 10?, and the driving is 45? wide and 15? tall.

The big question in my mind isn't their reliability or ability to generate massive amounts of light... What I'm wondering about is how much noise will they feed back into the radios? They're very well made, but that's no guarantee of being electrically quiet.

[ron sterba]

Well let's go to the heat thingie. The whole back 1 1/2" are fins for the heat sink. I was pleasantly surprised at what little heat was produce from about 2" in front of the lens for about 1 minute on my hand. I mounted the unit so as the lens of the light was about 2 1/2" aft of the wing lens. If I didn't have a scoop for my fuel injection I wouldn't have hesitated to mount this light housing in the front of my cowl.
As far as lumens and candelas go they vary on one of the charts in their website.Why,,?,, well that maybe as one of the fellas mentioned it maybe the reflectors around each lamp. Last night I compared my bright lights on my 98 astro van to this single E2-4 driving lamp and found it to have a comparable horizontal plane but the center spot of& the E2 really reached out!!! Now on a compassion level I bought the pair of (spot ) DUALLIES listed on their website. YES they were bright at 1500 lumens and the SPOT was out there but lacked ( in my opinion ) the lateral lighting. I called the company tech line to learn more about the their website chart with the graphic display of the models of hybrid light beams. It was so clear what I needed was a driving light.I didn't tell him it was a airplane I was putting it in he thought I had a off road vehicle. He wanted to know how fast I was driving in the desert at night. My was maybe 55 mph. He answered with some recommendations. So I sent my DUALLIES back and got ONE E 2-4. It also comes with a wiring harness and a round rocker switch. I won't be using the wire or switch. I did have pay a little more cash but surely got a lot of value. I found also on the site they sell lighting for emergency vehicles and that swayed me toward their company. In my shipping box came a notice of limited lifetime warranty so that was another item that impressed me. Just looking at the website it has item # 17361. I say this because there were so many pages I wasn't sure I would get back to that page. Now that Father's Day is coming you might need a light like this for your riding mower��✈️

[ron sterba]

Geoff that's the one!

[Toobuilder]

Originally Posted by Bavafa

Yet my Trustfire flash light modified for landing light provides a lot of light for the same amount of Amp draw. They claim 11000LM and I don?t know how inaccurate that claim is but it is far brighter than my Xanon lights and far cheaper than most if not all other landing lights. So far so good, zero RF noise and have been functioning flawlessly for the last year that they have been installed.

I looked at the units mentioned in this thread and they sure are pricey! Like you, I'm still impressed with my Trustfire 11000's. I run them day and night and over the last year (and 100+ hours) they have not let me down. The fact that they can retail a light that performs like this for $50 bucks leads me to believe there is a huge markup for the aviation (or vehicular) applications.