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Cabin area baggage lights
- Thread starter Davea320
- Start date
I gotta be honest, I put in an Aveo overhead dome light, and have used it precisely never in 12+ years. It sounds like a good idea, but honestly, I'd probably skip it if I did it over again.
As usual depends on your mission. I do night ops from time to time so I wired three red leds in the roll bar brace and two under the instrument panel. They are wired to a three minute timer triggered by the canopy latch. It gives me time to situate when I'm getting in, and time to close up when getting out, without losing night vison. Probably of no use if you don't fly at night.
Juliette
Juliette
This. My iPhone has a flashlight that is adequate for anything in the baggage area. And leaving the flashlight on isn't likely to kill the $250 battery in my airplane.
What I actually found *more* useful were two things...a dimmable strip of LEDs on the underside of the canopy dash, just forward of the edging material so it's out of sight, and a couple of LED "patches" that light up the footwells to aid in both maintenance and getting in and out safely at night.
Both are white, btw...research on night vision by the military indicates that very low levels of white light are pretty much the same for dark adaptation, and result in better visual acuity of items in the cockpit, than red. I just turn the under-dash lights down to minimum, and it's never been a problem. I'm not looking for stealth enemy fighters in the dark, after all.
(And the bright footwell lights are not used in flight).
Both are white, btw...research on night vision by the military indicates that very low levels of white light are pretty much the same for dark adaptation, and result in better visual acuity of items in the cockpit, than red. I just turn the under-dash lights down to minimum, and it's never been a problem. I'm not looking for stealth enemy fighters in the dark, after all.
(And the bright footwell lights are not used in flight).
Recharge battery strip LED lights. No wiring required and only put in when needed. Keep it charging on work bench until you need it. Probably use it once a year.
Mine is a slider so no roll bar brace back there, but I stuck an LED strip under the seat back cross bar. That makes it really easy to wire up because then you can just run them with the wiring to the flap motor.
I already had the 3 knob rheostat from Steinair and put both a white strip and a blue strip under the glare shield. Had an extra knob so I figured why not. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered.
The LED strips came from Stein, but you can get similar ones on Amazon.
In the picture below it looks blue, but thats only how it turned out in the picture because it's a white light shining on a gray interior.
I already had the 3 knob rheostat from Steinair and put both a white strip and a blue strip under the glare shield. Had an extra knob so I figured why not. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered.
The LED strips came from Stein, but you can get similar ones on Amazon.
In the picture below it looks blue, but thats only how it turned out in the picture because it's a white light shining on a gray interior.
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