Night time landing light failure

I have consistently found that not having a landing light on improves the quality of my night landings.
 
Unit74 said:
I want to see a 55W PAR36 LED pushed out. I mean, stupid effing bright. Like Je-zuhs man, WTF are you thinking bright! Yea, I'll buy it. I only have one light on my rig. I'll take all I can get..... But I ain't payin LoPresti that stupid amount a cash either. They are high.... literally on price and on drugs. But I'm sure they subscribe to the pilots are rich category given all their prices are effing ridiculous. I had a convo with a person at a fly in who used to work for them. Told her my issues with them and she agreed.
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AeroLEDs has a 100W PAR36 LED now(28V only), rated 11,000 lumens and 150,000 candela, up from 45W 4,950 lumens and 65,000 candela for their earlier one. No idea about night landings, but it(and the matching taxi light) look really pretty in the hangar.
 
Now if I only had a 28v rig......
 
The one thing I know is that they almost always fail at night.
 
Always fail at night? Or Always night when they fail? Big difference.
 
I bet 50% of the time or greater, if I am flying at night I have a landing light failure. Its just become par for the course.
 
The GE 4509 incandescent landing light in the AA-5X has a reputation of short life. Best to practice landing without the landing light some time, just in case. My light has treated me well, but I did have the airport operator forget to arm the runway lights for me one time (back when they were manually armed to save electricity). The only way I could get in that night was to land downwind over the pond at the end of the runway which was a good skylight reflector and runway locator. Fortunately, my instructor (who owned the airport and left the lights off for me) had trained me in various light-less landing emergencies, so I had done this before. In a remote airport with very little city or other nearby lighting, the black hole effect over the airport is very disconcerting, and potentially deadly if surrounding terrain is not friendly. Keeping the PAPIs or other runway visual aids in sight on final approach is a good idea.
 
I once needed to do a night landing at an airport that had pilot-controlled runway lights, and there was a stuck mic preventing activation of the lights. So I tried using the GPS to get me close enough for the landing light to become effective. As it happened, the first thing I saw was the landing light reflecting off of some signs for parallel taxiways!
 
Unit74 said:
. . . But I ain't payin LoPresti that stupid amount a cash either. They are high.... literally on price and on drugs.
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Groundpounder said:
There really is no compelling reason not to be lit up much as possible.
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I replaced my landing light with a Whelen LED certified part. Best $227 I spent on the plane last year. I installed it during my annual and IA signed it off in log book. Zero labor cost and easy to do. Performs perfectly with no side effects like interference to radios etc. My power load was reduced as well.

Nice never having to worry about the light working when needed.
 
I’m probably going to have to upgrade to LED’s as I recently installed a wig-wag control and wonder how long my incandescent bulbs are gonna last with that thing running? You’d think it would be hard on them but maybe not because they’re basically running a 50% duty cycle. Lots more use though even if I only run them in the pattern.
 
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