There's a lot of number crunching you can do when comparing landing lights, and there's also the never-ending argument of wing-tip vs leading edge placement. It's very easy to get lost in all of that, so this is a very simple review based on my personal experience.
I bought and installed 50w HID landing lights on my -7A in the wingtips from planelights.com (
http://www.planelights.com/index.php?id=661). I was worried about mounting them in the tips because of the possible lack of forward visibility directly in front of the airplane. The geometry seems such that it would be impossible to see directly in front of the airplane. I fly a fair amount of night hours, so good visibility is important to me.
I'm happy to report after my first round of night landings (just out of phase 1 testing), the landing lights are incredible. I did the landings on a 100' wide runway, and I could see from edge to edge and then some. Seeing in front of the airplane was NOT a problem. Those things put out so much light, it was incredible. The whole runway lit up like daylight. I sat as high in the seat as I could in order to try and see over the nose, but all the ground I could see had a huge amount of light on it. Taxiing was the same thing. The color was great too. The color is a very white, clean color. After flying alot of spam cans at night, the difference was... well... night and day.
Customer service was great too. After sitting on the shelf for almost 6 months, one of the lights didn't work when I finally installed them on the plane. After a quick phone call, I had a new one in just a few days.
Consider me one happy customer!
Review of planelights.com landing lights
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