There are many great debates among pilots, many of which you’ve probably debated yourself over an airport cafe lunch table or, more likely, within a social media group. You know the ones – lean of peak versus rich of peak, twin-engine safety versus single-engine safety, glass cockpits versus steam gauges, parachute or no parachute, etc.
There is no shortage of debate topics or opinions in a room full of pilots! The topic we are going to tackle today is one that is a regular discussion in our workplace hangar: When do you turn on certain aircraft lights?
You would think this is a cut-and-dried issue, but somehow highly experienced pilots manage to duke this out regularly. After you read this article you’ll realize my husband, Joe, and I are never going to agree or even agree to disagree just to stop the debate. We repetitively argue our respective sides to one another and whatever poor pilot happens to be nearby and typically starts staring at their shoelaces in an effort to remain quiet and not get dragged into the debate.
She Said
My husband says I’m a consummate rule follower, and he’s not wrong. Rules give me a sense of freedom while they make him feel constrained. Regarding aircraft lighting, I like rules because they are also status indicators that mean something to those around us. Let’s examine this from my perspective. I’ll start in the order I would use these lights, from startup to shutdown.
Beacon: This is one of only two switches I would contend should be a dusty switch in the lighting category. This means that in the aircraft I fly, it is never touched or turned off if it has its own switch apart from wingtip strobes and is not tied to the overall strobe lighting system. The beacon falls into the anti-collision light category that the FAA says should be operational if the engine is running, except where it creates a safety hazard. If power is being applied to the aircraft, the beacon is running.
A visible beacon ensures anyone walking around nearby has a chance to notice there is an aircraft that has power on for avoidance purposes. A bonus of never turning this switch off is that when I put an airplane away at the end of each flight, as I’m walking away from it on the ramp or about to close the hangar door, I can look back one last time and look for that flashing light indicating that I neglected to turn off my master battery power. I hate to admit (or maybe am happy to admit) that this method has prevented my return to a dead battery more than once in my almost three decades of flying when, in my post-flight haste to be somewhere else, I forgot this critical step in the checklist.
Nav lights: Navigation or position lights are the red, green and white lights found on the wingtips and tail of your aircraft that are supposed to give another pilot a visual indication of your direction at night when they spot you as traffic. The FAA says these lights must be on from sunset to sunrise. In practice, this is the other dusty switch for which I am a proponent. If they are not already on because they have been left that way, the nav lights come on as soon as I apply battery power to the aircraft.
Why? Because I like for others in the vicinity of the aircraft to know that there is power to it and that an engine start may be forthcoming. These lights cover almost all angles of view for a passing person and let them know not to get too close to the aircraft without first getting the pilot’s attention in the cockpit. If I am in an aircraft without a dedicated beacon light, these are the lights I leave on instead as I walk away from the aircraft, just for that look back that lets me sleep easier that night, knowing I didn’t forget to turn the battery master off.
Taxi light: This is an easy one. Turn it on when you’re ready to taxi, day or night. The easiest way to let a lineman or marshaller know that you are ready to leave your spot on the ramp is to flash the taxi light several times, then leave it on. This simple practice prevents you from looking like a drowning person waving for help as you try to get their attention through the window, for which they may not be able to see you because of glare or darkness. Leaving the light on as you taxi, even during the day, stands a good chance of catching the attention and preventing a slightly inattentive pilot from taxiing in front of you as they approach an intersecting taxiway. Turn this light off when you reach the runup or ramp area at the end of your taxi.
Landing light: This is a light I use differently based on whether I am approaching a controlled or non-controlled airport, and this light has saved me lots of frequency air time over the years. Let’s start first and foremost with what the regulations say. The FARs state a landing light must be operable for aircraft operations for hire at night. We can all get a little lax on checking this light in the summertime when days are long and night currency is difficult to keep. I challenge you to make this a part of your day and night flight preflight checks. In addition to requiring the light for the above flights, the FAA recommends that landing lights be on when below 10,000 feet as an additional collision avoidance measure.
Not only do lights make you more visible to aircraft in the vicinity, but they also make you more visible to birds. In the 90s, I helped collect and compile results from a survey a major airline conducted among its pilots to determine what effect lights had on bird strike occurrences. It turns out that planes with their taxi and landing lights on reported far fewer bird strikes than those that had their lights off. Those with pulsing taxi or landing lights reported even fewer still. Besides making yourself easy to see to other traffic, do yourself a favor and increase your odds of avoiding a costly bird strike incident as well.
I mentioned in the first sentence of this section that I use my lights differently when approaching uncontrolled versus controlled fields. When approaching either, wingtip-mounted taxi lights go on below 10,000 feet, per the FAA’s safety recommendation. If you’re in a retractable gear aircraft with your taxi and landing lights attached to your nose wheel, this advice means little to you, as you’re not likely to have your gear extended as you pass through 10,000 feet. Flip the switches anyway, as they’ll be visible soon enough.
My exception to this below 10,000-foot rule on the landing light is when I land at a controlled field. In that instance and that instance only, I do not touch my landing light until I have heard the words “cleared to land.” When those words are read back, I flip that switch. This little practice has saved me some on-air time when I’m on short final and can’t remember whether I received the landing clearance. A quick look at the switch that I only turn on when the landing clearance is received affirms what I could not recollect. If I see that switch in the off position during that final approach check, I ask for my landing clearance from the controllers.
Strobe/Anti-collision lights: Ugh. These lights are the ones that annoy me the most when used improperly. Let me be very clear: I don’t care if you have LED lights that will never burn out and have new timing mechanisms that make them only slightly less obnoxious when viewed from close up by an unsuspecting passerby or low-sitting aircraft. These lights should go on when you are ready to roll onto the runway and back off as soon as you clear the runway after landing. They should never be left on while taxiing, sitting on a ramp or in a run-up area. Please, for the love of all things shiny and upright, stop blinding the people around you on the ground.
As you can see, I clearly love rules, customs and mental cues centered around aircraft lighting. From my perspective, they are built-in tools in our toolbox that can be used on an aircraft in meaningful ways. If they were meant to come on and stay on, they would be tied to the master battery switch and wouldn’t have their own on/off switch! Feel free to try to change my mind … Joe attempts it regularly.
He Said
In the Army we had ramp police. This title was ascribed to that small band of nit-noid pilots in the unit who would look for anything and everything for which to complain. Miss the yellow line with the nose tire while parking? The ramp police would let you know. Don’t have the blades at a perfect 45-degree position after shutdown? The ramp police would talk about you at the next pilot briefing. Taxi in with the lights in the wrong configuration? Heaven help you … you’d hear about that for the next month.
Every unit has ramp police, and general aviation has its own version of the ramp police. I taxied into a ramp at a regional airport recently in a Piper M600 with LED lights, and one of the crusty old Cessna Citation pilots asked why I taxied in with my landing light on. Yup, you guessed it: He was one of the ramp police.
What is their favorite sin of no consequence to point out? Mishandling aircraft external lighting.
There was (is) a set of unwritten rules that mandated the use of external lighting. A fair summation of these rules is:
- The anti-collision light is to be turned on before starting the engine(s) to visually announce to people on the ground that the airplane is about to be started.
- Position lights are to be used only during nighttime operations.
- Landing and taxi lights are runway items that are turned on when taking the runway and turned off when the wheels come up; turned on again when the landing gear is lowered and off again when leaving the runway.
- Strobe lights are to be turned on when taking a runway and turned off when leaving a runway. The only time the strobe lights are turned off in flight is during flight into IMC to reduce the strobe effect that could instigate flicker vertigo.
- In modern times, though, things have changed. We now have LED lights, or we should have LED lights. While we have new and improved lights, we don’t have new and improved unwritten rules or a new and improved cadre of ramp police. So, I think it is acceptable for new rules to be written.
- A fair summation for the new rules for flying with LED lights should be: Turn on all lights and leave them on.
That’s it. Period. Turn them on and leave them on. External aircraft switches should be dusty switches, also known as cockpit switches that don’t get moved much.
But every time I teach this new rule to pilots, I get huge pushback. I’ll hear lamenting such as “We must follow the checklist,” “I don’t want to annoy others” or “That’s not what my instructor taught me.” It seems that old habits are hard to kill. The ramp police are out in full force.
There might be some written rules related to external lighting in Part 121, 135 and military jet flying but only because of SOPs (standard operating procedures) that are inherent to those operations. In Part 91 flying, though, there is no rule for operating external lights on an airplane other than FAR Part 91.209. That regulation mostly pertains to night flight and does not give specific guidance for use of landing lights, logo lights, strobe lights or any other type of lighting bolted on the airplane during daytime operations.
With this discussion, I’m going to assume you already have LED lights on your airplane. Don’t have LED lights? Tsk, tsk, let’s change that today. LED lights are far better than old-style incandescent lights. LED lights don’t create extra heat, use hardly any electricity and the bulb life is more than 20,000 hours (far longer than any GA airframe lifespan). In today’s aviation world, there’s simply no reason not to change to LED. So, if you use incandescent lights, then you should probably read the unwritten rules (above) and act accordingly. But, if you have joined us here in modern times, you’ve upgraded to LED and the rest of this article is germane to your flying.
Strobe/Anti-collision lights: In the old days, a strobe light was annoying if turned on while on the ground. The strobe light was intended to be annoying; it was meant to draw attention, visually shouting, “Here I am!” There was nothing worse than waiting in line for takeoff and having some rookie ahead of you turn on their strobe light.
Old-style incandescent strobe lights blinked at 7 to 14 beats per second, a rate which mysteriously can create flicker vertigo. Flicker vertigo is a real thing that can be completely incapacitating, and there’s no reason that any strobe light in aviation should flicker in the 7 to 14 beats per second range. Today, we’ve got LED strobe lights that are designed to not pulse at a frequency that can elicit flicker vertigo. Modern LED strobes do a great job of pulsing at a rate that is obvious yet not annoying.
Nav lights: We’ve been told not to use position/nav lights during the daytime because for decades the incandescent position lights had a limited life. A reasonable owner/pilot would not use the position lights to save them for a night flight. In turbine airplanes, everything must work and a burned-out nav light could cause the trip to be delayed or canceled until maintenance can replace the bulb. Now we have LED position lights available with a 20,000-plus-hour bulb life, which should never need replacement. You can turn on your LED position lights and leave that switch on forever, making it a deserved dusty switch in your airplane.
Landing light and taxi light: Why would a pilot not have these on all the time in flight? Most landing lights are attached to the landing gear of advanced airplanes, and when the gear comes up, the landing light is not visible. I really don’t care if the LED landing lights remain on (or off) while they are in the wells. They don’t create heat, don’t take up much electrical power and don’t annoy anyone. So, it does not matter if the landing light switch is left in the on position always in flight. Turn it on and leave it on. In flight, the landing and taxi lights are dusty switches.
The only person who might be offended by leaving the LED landing light switch on is the line personnel during ground operations. I can see where the landing light could be considered annoying to the line personnel waving you into the parking spot at night, though during the day that light is certainly not annoying. Scarily, I see pilots flying at night attempt to be cool by turning off the landing light far too early and making much of their taxiing half-blind on a dark ramp. It is better to risk annoying a line guy than to drive your airplane into an unlit obstacle.
I took an informal poll of line personnel as I prepared to write this article, and I’ve come to the consensus that line personnel really don’t care about aircraft lighting use during the day. What do they really want? They’d just really like for you to make a fast runup so they don’t have to stand out in the sun/rain/snow/wind for long. Courtesy, respect, a smile and an occasional Thomas Jefferson are what they really want. Lights are inconsequential to ramp personnel.
Commonplace use of exterior lighting is based on an old system with incandescent lights and propagated by airline and military pilots, many of whom are cloaked ramp police who argue that everyone must follow the checklist. But they don’t really know how your checklist reads in your Part 91 airplane. They’ll tell you about the unwritten rules, but only because they were taught decades ago about them and have lived by “this is the way it has always been done.” But there’s a new unwritten rule!
When should you turn on and off the lights? You decide. Consider what type of lights are bolted on your airplane. For me, I turn all lights on for the entire flight and almost always while taxiing. I want to look like a Christmas tree flying around or taxiing around. I want everyone to see me. I want to be lit up like the Fourth of July. Turn everything on and leave it on. That goes for ground and flight. Remember, LED lights are not annoying.
The only exception on the ground is when I might be annoying. I try to be friendly to the line personnel if I’m shining a light directly in their face. If I’m in a long line awaiting takeoff at a big airport, I’ll fit in and “while in Rome, I’ll act like a Roman” and wait to turn on my strobe lights. No one wants to be annoying, or no one should want to be annoying. I don’t want to be Pharisaical about either using or not using lights. But when given the chance, I light up everything.
There are many reasons to have the lights on in all phases of operation if you have LED lights and few reasons to turn off your lights. Remember, your POH was probably written decades ago when LED lighting was not available. Use lights to your benefit. There are now LED lights, and that changes everything.
The next time you are at an FBO, grab a hamburger and fries and sit where you have a nice view of the ramp. At some point, there’ll likely be a modern airplane taxi with all the LED lights on. If not biased, you’ll notice how the lights are pleasant, not annoying. You’ll notice that you see that airplane sooner because of the lights. LED lights are not annoying and not offensive, unlike the ramp police. The rules have changed. And I think that is a good thing.
What’s your opinion?
If you’d like to join this great debate in person, feel free to stop in at the big blue hangar at KLFK and join Joe and Deanna in their frequent rehashing of the subject. Otherwise, they’d love to see your letters giving them more great tips, tricks, anecdotes and uses for the lighting systems on your aircraft. Send your comments to melinda@kingairmagazine.com.