Portable Runway Lights

[Burkeomatic]

As the days get shorter, and I get into night flying, I have come to the realization that I would like to get some sort of portable runway lights. The first thing that popped into my mind was battery operated christmas lights. I was also thinking of one of those portable rechargable spotlights to perhaps light my landing area. 

I really like the idea of laying a striplight or something out, then sticking my plane in loiter mode over the landing area, walking over, turning the lights on, and landing it. Getting the lights first layed out over the day. 

I probably also need to look into getting a better camera for the dragon. I may switch the dolphin camera into the dragon and put the mega large starlight camera back on the dolphin. I would put that on the dragon, but it is sized for a mini camera and not a full sized one. 

All this because the night landing in the dragon was super scary. Like you couldn't even hardly see anything in the camera. I was relying on some lights in the parking lot for spatial orientation, and the heading and altimeter do judge direction and how close to the ground I was. About as close to an instrument landing as I would like to get for an RC plane. 

What was really fun is when I got to 0m on the altimeter, then I realized I had calibrated my launch point on slightly higher ground, so I had to keep slowly descending not knowing how close I was to a couple of obstacles I knew of while trying to ease it down. Luckily it was -1m. 

[Mr NCT]

Do you have the room/weight to install a landing headlight?  I learned to fly on a grass strip that looked like black velvet at night even with the runway marker lights.  It wasn't until you were low enough for the landing light to light up the grass that your rear end let go of the seat.

[Burkeomatic]

Oct 6, 2022 10:56:57 GMT Mr NCT said:

Do you have the room/weight to install a landing headlight?  I learned to fly on a grass strip that looked like black velvet at night even with the runway marker lights.  It wasn't until you were low enough for the landing light to light up the grass that your rear end let go of the seat.

I am going to install a landing light to for that exact reason. I want the lights on the ground to basically designate the area I want to put the plane down in and help with the approach, and line me up to go around the obstacles as you can see on my typical approach here. My concern if I don't line out my landing area, is that little batting cage fence thing is invisible through my FPV goggles at night and I think by the time it lit up with a light, I would be hosed. So I will just set up a line of lights at an angle the way I come in like that to help me get lined up and also a fun game to try and land right on the lights. 

[ratcheeroo]

My thought was if you hooked up a set of these to a battery, they would be super bright and you could set a pattern to flash to make it more visible from a distance


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