Whelen Orion LED Nav/Strobe Lights

While at Sebring for the Light Aircraft show I happened to see the new Whelen Orion LED Nav/Strobe lights designed to fit in Van's wing tip lenses. The Orion lights have a very cool futuristic look and save a lot of power and weight. I really didn't need another installation project for my RV-10, but after four days of staring in amazement across the aisle at those bright LED strobe lights I could no longer resist. I justified it by telling myself that it wouldn't take very long to replace my current lights with those shiny new ones........and for once I was right. It ended up only taking about two hours to replace the existing Nav/Strobe assembly, including removing the large and heavy strobe power supply from the back of the RV-10. I didn't even have to remove the wing tips from the RV-10. They had the same mounting pattern and even used less wires! Awesome!

Here are the final results










I am sure they have made the plane faster.. This is a picture from last weekends flight home from Sunriver.

That is 194kts ground speed

They are completely silent and so far everyone that have seen them are totally amazed at how bright they are.


Rob Hickman
Advanced Flight Systems
N402RH RV-10

They are great lights. Here is an installation in an RV-8 wingtip.

Of course they make the plane go faster! The almost-dusk shot with the JJ Abrams lens flares should be good for at least another 5 knots, right? That's the default rule for "addition of cool new plane toy".

In all seriousness, now it'd be interesting to hear from someone to see how they compare against AeroLEDs. I might have to consider those instead of the Pulsars.

Lights? Wires?

I was looking at this system and thinking that I would really like to update the creative air LED's I installed. Which tail light is that in the picture? Is is also a strobe? How do you wire this? Is there a central power supply or do the strobes fire themselves? The Aero system uses four wires: Power to nav, power to strobe, sync ground. Same idea here? The ACS website and Whelen website are very sparse on information.

Thanks

Michael WYnn
RV 8 Finishing
San Ramon, CA

What is the peak current draw of the strobes? I'm having a tough time finding peak data in the literature. I'll use this information to size the fuse. I plan on syncing all three strobes.

Whelen Installation Guide

See the Whelen Installation Guide for the unit(s) desired (found under the document tab on their website) - the anti-collision pulse amperes are listed as well as the "typical" anti-collision amps. For example, the Orion 650E wingtip light has a pulse amperage of 3.6A and for the 500 tail light, it is 3.8A... so with all three synchronized, the total would be 11 amps with each pulse.
Hence, someone here has mentioned that it took a 15 amp breaker on the VP-X unit so it would not trip each time the lights pulsed.

Hope this helps!

I must have been blind the day I was looking for it. So obvious. Thanks.

bought mine from Kahuna- great service, and great product