Hello All,

A landing light needs to be replaced in the '73 182P aircraft that i fly. One of the two that is located in the lower front cowl.

Anyone have any tips on how to do this...is it simple or does half of the aircraft need to dissassembled to access it?!lol

Also...any experience with the new style LED lights vesus the old halogen style? Makes to suggest?

Cheers


macdon221

It's pretty easy to do. From the maintenance manual:

* Remove the lower cowl and disconnect wires from the landing and taxi lamps.
* Remove screws securing lamp assembly to support and remove lamp assembly.
* Remove screws securing bracket to plate and remove lamp.
* To reinstall, reverse this procedure.

There's a diagram that goes along with those instructions that points out which screws are which, but once you get in there, you'll see it's pretty self-explanatory.

My only experience with LED lights (other than installing them on other people's planes) is seeing them on other planes. Very noticeable. I'd definitely upgrade from incandescent if I weren't already spending everything I can toward replacement parts on my engine. Any lamp made under a TSO or PMA will work well and won't require anything more than a logbook entry from you to install.

Definitely upgrade your lights (both of them--the other will go out soon enough). I had Precise Flight HID lights put into the wing of my P172D, and it makes a huge difference with these old eyes for night landings, taxiing, etc. A few years later I added the Pulselight module, which is great for being seen--it flashes both lights simultaneously in my case, since they're right beside each other, although in cowl mount lights, they're usually wired to flash alternatively. The benefit is that once installed, the HID lights (and I think this is true for LED lights, although I haven't researched it) are warranted for 5000 hours of use--and unless you run them constantly, that's a whale of a long time.

Cary

Check out AeroLeds, brighter than the competition and PMA'd. Aviat is installing them in almost all the new Huskys they sell.

Here's a comparison shot on my inside hangar door of a Q4509 on the left vs a AeroLed SunSpot 36LX on the right. I also comparted it to a 55 watt HID, and the LED put out an equal amount of light (measured by eyeball) but with a more uniform beam spread.




Projected life span of the LEDs is almost 10X that of a HID (5K vs 50K hours), course I guess that's pretty irrelevant as either will see me through the rest of my flying days.

For anti-collision and when pulsed with either the built in wig-wag (HX version) or Pulselight, the LED lights have a clear advantage due to their fast on/off rise time with no ramp-up like an incandescent or HID. The fast switching is very noticable in one's peripheral vision.

bumper

I did mine on my cowl in the 185. There are two contenders in the LED category, Whelen and Teledyne. The Teledyne ones are a bit more expensive, but the light they put out is more visible over a distance due to the color. I compared them side by side (borrowed a couple). My old eyes liked the Teledyne color better and it made things more visible. The other nice thing, the pattern from the landing light portion spills over to the taxi part so you get some boost in taxi illumination as well.

I'm sure the selection of new tech landing lights will assume oil discussions in religious fervor. If you can borrow one of each and see how it looks to you, may help your selection and keep ecclesiastical decision making out of it. The color may not matter to you, we all see a little different when it comes to color.

Dogpilot,

You say there are two contenders for LED landing lights, Whelen and Teledyne?? How are you reaching that conclusing?

"Aviation Consumer", in doing their review and comparison, chose AeroLeds as the clear winner.

When comparing the LED options myself, I used a number of criteria, not easy BTW, as the manufacturers don't always list specs in the same manner and thus the numbers don't always tell the same story. For light output, lumens is the measure to use, but even that can be fudged some. Another criteria is how much power the light consumes, more watts generally means more light. If they don't list wattage, but instead list current draw, the formula is P=IE (power = current X voltage).

Up at the Husky gathering at the Root Ranch in ID last August, there was a Whelen equipped Husky parked on the other side of the field right next to another dog with AeroLeds. After dark we did a comparison with us as the target a couple of hundred yards away from the planes. In terms of brilliance and light, there was absolutely no comparison. But then the Whelen Parmetheus is only rated at 16.8 watts while the AeroLeds is a 45 watt light (2400 lumens).

Teledyne Alphbeam, like the AeroLeds SunSpot I'm using, is 45 watts, though I've not tested it or recall seeing a side-by-side comparison.

Bumper,

Only one of the Aero LED lamps (a landing light) is currently PMA'd. See: http://www.aeroleds.com/products/landin ... ified.aspx

Bear in mind that a manufacturer MAY use non certified parts if they go through their own process of certification. There are a couple of parts in several airplanes that come straight from NAPA Auto Parts, not these lights, but.

MTV

I've got a Teledyne Alphabeam and love it. It's definitely brighter than the Parametheus. I don't know about the aeroled's brightness but the industry is sounding off about the promises not kept by aeroled's as a company. It's prolly resolved by now.

Spruce just lowered the price on Alphabeams to $249 I think.

SixTwoLeemer,

What broken promise issues are you referring to?

I did a Google search but could only find reference to an early production problem with water intrusion on their Pulsar nav/strobe lights. Once the problem was identified it was taken care of with a free recall.

I met Dean Wilkinson when he gave a presentation at the Root Ranch Husky fly-in last August. I stopped by the AeroLeds factory on my way home and had lunch with Dean. Then picked up my nav/strobes at "the source" (I previously bought the landing lights). I was a Navy electronics tech for 8 years way back, and subsequently built a business involving electronics. I'm not an engineer, but consider myself semi-well versed in the field. I had a bunch of technical questions, Dean knows his stuff.

I was cautioned about the need for proper grounding of the lights to avoid any issues with RFI (radio frequency interference). So during the install I made sure to check for that using a handheld w/squelch off. No problems.

bumper