Night Flying With LED Lights
LED lights have made night flying as easy as flying in the day. Planes fly the same in the dark as as they do in the light. The main difference is what is happening in the pilots head. Design your plane so you can tell top from bottom so it is easy to stay oriented to. If the lights are installed correctly the planes can even survive combat at night. LEDs at Hobby King link
See the videos at the bottom to see LED light installation. Light installation is easier than you think.
See the sky painting pictures below. Night flying allows you to use community fields after all of the soccer kids have gone to bed. We even night fly in the winter because it gets dark around here about 5 PM in the middle of the winter and the lights look great over the snow.
Our EPP planes are perfect for LED lights. The EPP foam lights up so well that I only have to put lights on one side of the plane with the lights facing in and the plane is brighter than the moon in the sky. The new LED lights are bright enough that I can fly with city lights around and still see my plane. The light sets I use have 60 lights per meter and are very bright. I run them off the balance plug on my flight battery. The brightest colors are white and green followed by red, yellow and blue. The brighter lights tend to wash out the dimmer lights so do some testing before committing to a certain design to make sure all of your lights can be seen.
LED light strips are brighter, lighter, less expensive and easier to work with than glow wire or light sticks. Glow wire requires a separate battery set up that adds a lot of weight and is not as bright as the LED lights. Light sticks are only good for one night and not as bright as the strands of LED lights.
One 60 bulb strip of LED lights use very little power. One or two strips of lights won't make a big difference in how long your plane will fly. If you see that the lights dim as you go full throttle you are overloading your battery or your battery is going dead. I have seen flyers use as many as 10 strands of different colored lights. Each set of lights uses between 0.6 and 1 watt so figure that in to the battery needs you will have for your plane if you are using many sets of lights. There are light controllers you can buy to get a flashing light show that you can control from your transmitter. I tend to keep my lights simple and light weight. The flying wings (Widowmakers and Assassins) above only have one strip of 60 LEDs in them which is a meter long and uses less than 1 watt of power. I use two or three strips of lights in my Titans and Grim Reapers. The Albatross and Pelican conventional planes below have either two or three light strips in them. You can cut and wire strips in any configuration you want.
The flying fields for night flying may have un-lighted trees or people roaming in the dark. It is a little harder to estimate distance so get in the habit of keeping the plane closer to avoid climbing trees at night. If you have a tree in the field, light it with a flashlight or LED lights or a light stick to help you avoid it. Have people carry light sticks or head lamps to make sure you know where they are. If you know your flying field well it is easy to get used to flying in the dark.
Noise carries a lot farther at night and is a lot more annoying. Most cities have noise ordinances and you are more likely to get complaints and lose flying fields if you choose the wrong planes. We have an 8PM sound curfew where we live and the police will respond if called. Our slow flyers and 3D planes are great planes for city parks because they are slow and quiet. I have never had a sound complaint although the police have gotten a few UFO reports when we are flying. Luckily several of the local police officers fly with us. High speed models or planes that are noisy should be taken to fields where they won’t disturb the neighbors but it still is fun to fly the fast planes at night too just choose an isolated flying field.
Do not fly over the heads of people doing activities on the fields. Most are distracted by what they are doing and won’t be watching your plane making them less likely to get out of the way when you land or if you crash. We have had people come from over 4 miles away to see what we are doing. We have had people come and find us after they saw us while they were driving down a lighted freeway over a mile a way. Realize that airports and full sized planes may see you from a long distance too so be careful where and how high you fly because there are cases where full sized aircraft and police helicopters have reported seeing lighted planes at night. We were flying off cliffs over St George Utah with about 8 flyers and had a string of cars a mile long driving up to see what we were doing.
People will be watching. There is a good side to this. Night flying is a great recruiting tool for your local flying group. Several of our club found us when we were night flying. We have also noticed that the women love to watch us flying at night and are much more impressed with RC at night than when we are flying the same planes in the day. We have heard may wives tell their husbands that he should get one of these.
I like to use the balance plug on the battery as the power source for the lights. (See photos below) It can easily carry enough power to run your LED light strips. This leaves the larger power wire on the battery free to hook to the speed control without having to make a special connecter to run the lights. I like to buy a balance plug extension wire and modify it and use it as a plug for connecting the lights. You will only use the end of the extension that plugs onto the battery. See pictures below.
You only need to connect to the black and red outside wires on the extension plug. Pull out the yellow and green wires. Cut off the black and red wires to desired length that will reach from the lights to the battery. Double check with a volt meter that you have 11.1+ volts from the wires when plugged into the balance plug. If the voltage is less you may not have the two end wires on the connecter. LED lights have two different colored wires. The colored wire often indicates the color of the lights. The black wire is ground.
Wire the lights to the balance connecter plug wires matching the ground and power wires. Several sets of LED lights can be powered off of the one plug. Solder and wire nut the wires together as needed to get power to all of the lights. Have all sets of light wires connect to the plug unless you understand the lights well enough to make longer chains of lights. I like the polarized Deans mini plugs to connect wing lights to fuselage and tail lights so I can take my planes apart for transport.
Many flyers tape the lights to the outside of the plane. This causes a lot of turbulence in the air flowing over the wing and decreases the lift significantly. We recommend that the lights are installed in the EPP fuselage and EPP wings to improve plane performance. We like to install our strings of lights on only the bottom of the plane. Lights on the top can affect airflow and decrease the lift of the plane. The lights can either be pointed up, pointed down or put in sideways in this slot you cut on the bottom of the wing.
See the videos at the bottom to see LED light installation. Light installation is easier than you think.
See the sky painting pictures below. Night flying allows you to use community fields after all of the soccer kids have gone to bed. We even night fly in the winter because it gets dark around here about 5 PM in the middle of the winter and the lights look great over the snow.
Our EPP planes are perfect for LED lights. The EPP foam lights up so well that I only have to put lights on one side of the plane with the lights facing in and the plane is brighter than the moon in the sky. The new LED lights are bright enough that I can fly with city lights around and still see my plane. The light sets I use have 60 lights per meter and are very bright. I run them off the balance plug on my flight battery. The brightest colors are white and green followed by red, yellow and blue. The brighter lights tend to wash out the dimmer lights so do some testing before committing to a certain design to make sure all of your lights can be seen.
LED light strips are brighter, lighter, less expensive and easier to work with than glow wire or light sticks. Glow wire requires a separate battery set up that adds a lot of weight and is not as bright as the LED lights. Light sticks are only good for one night and not as bright as the strands of LED lights.
One 60 bulb strip of LED lights use very little power. One or two strips of lights won't make a big difference in how long your plane will fly. If you see that the lights dim as you go full throttle you are overloading your battery or your battery is going dead. I have seen flyers use as many as 10 strands of different colored lights. Each set of lights uses between 0.6 and 1 watt so figure that in to the battery needs you will have for your plane if you are using many sets of lights. There are light controllers you can buy to get a flashing light show that you can control from your transmitter. I tend to keep my lights simple and light weight. The flying wings (Widowmakers and Assassins) above only have one strip of 60 LEDs in them which is a meter long and uses less than 1 watt of power. I use two or three strips of lights in my Titans and Grim Reapers. The Albatross and Pelican conventional planes below have either two or three light strips in them. You can cut and wire strips in any configuration you want.
The flying fields for night flying may have un-lighted trees or people roaming in the dark. It is a little harder to estimate distance so get in the habit of keeping the plane closer to avoid climbing trees at night. If you have a tree in the field, light it with a flashlight or LED lights or a light stick to help you avoid it. Have people carry light sticks or head lamps to make sure you know where they are. If you know your flying field well it is easy to get used to flying in the dark.
Noise carries a lot farther at night and is a lot more annoying. Most cities have noise ordinances and you are more likely to get complaints and lose flying fields if you choose the wrong planes. We have an 8PM sound curfew where we live and the police will respond if called. Our slow flyers and 3D planes are great planes for city parks because they are slow and quiet. I have never had a sound complaint although the police have gotten a few UFO reports when we are flying. Luckily several of the local police officers fly with us. High speed models or planes that are noisy should be taken to fields where they won’t disturb the neighbors but it still is fun to fly the fast planes at night too just choose an isolated flying field.
Do not fly over the heads of people doing activities on the fields. Most are distracted by what they are doing and won’t be watching your plane making them less likely to get out of the way when you land or if you crash. We have had people come from over 4 miles away to see what we are doing. We have had people come and find us after they saw us while they were driving down a lighted freeway over a mile a way. Realize that airports and full sized planes may see you from a long distance too so be careful where and how high you fly because there are cases where full sized aircraft and police helicopters have reported seeing lighted planes at night. We were flying off cliffs over St George Utah with about 8 flyers and had a string of cars a mile long driving up to see what we were doing.
People will be watching. There is a good side to this. Night flying is a great recruiting tool for your local flying group. Several of our club found us when we were night flying. We have also noticed that the women love to watch us flying at night and are much more impressed with RC at night than when we are flying the same planes in the day. We have heard may wives tell their husbands that he should get one of these.
I like to use the balance plug on the battery as the power source for the lights. (See photos below) It can easily carry enough power to run your LED light strips. This leaves the larger power wire on the battery free to hook to the speed control without having to make a special connecter to run the lights. I like to buy a balance plug extension wire and modify it and use it as a plug for connecting the lights. You will only use the end of the extension that plugs onto the battery. See pictures below.
You only need to connect to the black and red outside wires on the extension plug. Pull out the yellow and green wires. Cut off the black and red wires to desired length that will reach from the lights to the battery. Double check with a volt meter that you have 11.1+ volts from the wires when plugged into the balance plug. If the voltage is less you may not have the two end wires on the connecter. LED lights have two different colored wires. The colored wire often indicates the color of the lights. The black wire is ground.
Wire the lights to the balance connecter plug wires matching the ground and power wires. Several sets of LED lights can be powered off of the one plug. Solder and wire nut the wires together as needed to get power to all of the lights. Have all sets of light wires connect to the plug unless you understand the lights well enough to make longer chains of lights. I like the polarized Deans mini plugs to connect wing lights to fuselage and tail lights so I can take my planes apart for transport.
Many flyers tape the lights to the outside of the plane. This causes a lot of turbulence in the air flowing over the wing and decreases the lift significantly. We recommend that the lights are installed in the EPP fuselage and EPP wings to improve plane performance. We like to install our strings of lights on only the bottom of the plane. Lights on the top can affect airflow and decrease the lift of the plane. The lights can either be pointed up, pointed down or put in sideways in this slot you cut on the bottom of the wing.
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This is a simple set up on one of my 3 night set ups on Widowmakers with one color of LEDs on a flying wing. I kept the LEDs to the front of the plane to help keep the CG forward. These LEDs are put on after the lamination with a slot cut through the laminate and tape and the LEDS taped with the bulbs facing into the wing.
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All of the pictures below are of the same plane with the programmable LEDs from Hobby King. I can change the colors in flight by flipping a switch on my transmitter. They are presently listed as unavailable but we hope to find a similar programable product soon. These LEDs have 9 different functions, some of which flash different colors. This set is 2 meters long which makes them a great deal for about $12. The LEDs in the Assassin below were put in a deeper slot around the perimeter with the LEDs facing out. The LEDs were installed before E-taping and laminating. The stripes are the only difference in appearance from the top to bottom of the plane.
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To install lights in a flying wing that has already been covered, cut a razor blade slit along the bottom of the plane only on the path where you want the lights to go. Cut through the laminate and Scotch Extreme Tape to leave a path for the lights. The lights will light up the wing for about 3 inches so make at least a few of the lights visible from the front of the plane or you won’t be able to see it on landing. Make some lights visible from the back of the plane or the plane will disappear when it is flying directly away from you.
Take a hot soldering iron and melt the slot open wide enough to install the lights. You cut a different depth and width of slot depending on how you want to install the lights. Do not cut the spars but go under the spars by making a larger hole on both sides of the spar and feeding the lights through the hole under the spar. I don’t permanently attach the lights to the plane. I have had light strips break or fail. Because I put the lights in a slot in the wing and covering it with regular clear packing tape I can replace the light set in minutes, not hours, without cutting into the plane. This is one of the big advantages of using this method of installation on EPP foam that lights up well without blocking the light.
When the LED lights are pointed into the foam from the bottom of, the top of the plane is brighter but the bottom of the plane is still bright because the light lights up the surrounding the EPP foam. When your lights are aimed out of the wing, the lights under the plane are brighter and visible from a longer distance but you will have less light on the top of the plane. The lights on their side will aim the lights forward or back in the wing or fuselage and light the top and the bottom of the plane equally. Each plane will be different so you need to do a little experimentation to see what you like the best.
If the lights are pointed up you only have to cut the slot as wide as the bulbs on the lights strips. Pull off the adhesive strip on the back and press the bulbs into the slit and put a clear piece of 2″ packing tape over the top to hold them in place. Light will shine into the foam and light it up like a chandelier and some light will come through the LED strip depending on the brand of LED lights.
If the lights are pointed down you have to cut the slot as wide as the entire LED light strip. The lights have to be glued in place or stuck in with the adhesive backing on the light strips. I usually use a little hot glue to keep them from moving but not so much I can’t easily get them out. On laminated planes you can apply clear packing tape over the top to keep the lights clean and in the slot and to improve the air flow over the slot. On planes that are EPP foam without laminate I glue the lights in place. When the lights point out you can design totally different colors top and bottom on the plane. It this installation slots also have to be cut on the top of the plane to mount the lights and more sets of lights added. Be careful to keep the total plane weight down and not make the plane tail heavy.
If the lights are pointed sideways they are pressed entirely into a deeper slot and aimed in a direction you want the light to go. You can light up the foam in front or in back of the light set just by which way the lights are aimed. A clear piece of tape over the top will seal them in but make them easy to access for repair and reuse if you want to use them on another plane.
If you are using one set of lights that shows on both sides of the wing you need to do something to make the top and bottom of the plane appear different colors or do something that will make it so you can tell top and bottom from a distance. I have used transparent colored packing tape over white lights to get different colors without having different colors of lights.
I like the effect of a using a single color of lights and most of my night planes are built and flown this way. If you put colored tape over colored lights you get some strange effects because often the light color doesn’t change color it just gets darker because the lights are only making one color of light that can’t be changed with colored tape.
Below are some time of our exposure pictures of "sky painting" with the Albatross and Pelicans. To do sky painting you need a camera that is capable of taking a time exposure. The pictures below are 15 second exposures with an older digital Canon S5IS. It is a challenge to keep the plane in the picture during the exposure.
I put the camera on a tripod, set the focus to infinity, turn the exposure to 15 seconds and open the aperture to F-3.5. We have learned to watch the plane fly through the camera to know where we have to fly to stay in the picture. We then climb to the top of the frame of the picture area before we start the picture so that we can get our speed up for the aerobatics and aren’t caught in a slow boring climb. We have tried pictures with two planes but they seem to get too cluttered with too many flight paths.
The camera does the calculating and processes the picture but don’t stop there,. Import your picture to an editing program on your computer (like Picassa) and turn the shadows up and play with the light settings. It really dresses up the picture and brightens the lights on the plane. I always take a bunch and throw the ugly ones away.
Night flying is addicting …… Don’t say I didn’t warn you!!!
-Lee
Take a hot soldering iron and melt the slot open wide enough to install the lights. You cut a different depth and width of slot depending on how you want to install the lights. Do not cut the spars but go under the spars by making a larger hole on both sides of the spar and feeding the lights through the hole under the spar. I don’t permanently attach the lights to the plane. I have had light strips break or fail. Because I put the lights in a slot in the wing and covering it with regular clear packing tape I can replace the light set in minutes, not hours, without cutting into the plane. This is one of the big advantages of using this method of installation on EPP foam that lights up well without blocking the light.
When the LED lights are pointed into the foam from the bottom of, the top of the plane is brighter but the bottom of the plane is still bright because the light lights up the surrounding the EPP foam. When your lights are aimed out of the wing, the lights under the plane are brighter and visible from a longer distance but you will have less light on the top of the plane. The lights on their side will aim the lights forward or back in the wing or fuselage and light the top and the bottom of the plane equally. Each plane will be different so you need to do a little experimentation to see what you like the best.
If the lights are pointed up you only have to cut the slot as wide as the bulbs on the lights strips. Pull off the adhesive strip on the back and press the bulbs into the slit and put a clear piece of 2″ packing tape over the top to hold them in place. Light will shine into the foam and light it up like a chandelier and some light will come through the LED strip depending on the brand of LED lights.
If the lights are pointed down you have to cut the slot as wide as the entire LED light strip. The lights have to be glued in place or stuck in with the adhesive backing on the light strips. I usually use a little hot glue to keep them from moving but not so much I can’t easily get them out. On laminated planes you can apply clear packing tape over the top to keep the lights clean and in the slot and to improve the air flow over the slot. On planes that are EPP foam without laminate I glue the lights in place. When the lights point out you can design totally different colors top and bottom on the plane. It this installation slots also have to be cut on the top of the plane to mount the lights and more sets of lights added. Be careful to keep the total plane weight down and not make the plane tail heavy.
If the lights are pointed sideways they are pressed entirely into a deeper slot and aimed in a direction you want the light to go. You can light up the foam in front or in back of the light set just by which way the lights are aimed. A clear piece of tape over the top will seal them in but make them easy to access for repair and reuse if you want to use them on another plane.
If you are using one set of lights that shows on both sides of the wing you need to do something to make the top and bottom of the plane appear different colors or do something that will make it so you can tell top and bottom from a distance. I have used transparent colored packing tape over white lights to get different colors without having different colors of lights.
I like the effect of a using a single color of lights and most of my night planes are built and flown this way. If you put colored tape over colored lights you get some strange effects because often the light color doesn’t change color it just gets darker because the lights are only making one color of light that can’t be changed with colored tape.
Below are some time of our exposure pictures of "sky painting" with the Albatross and Pelicans. To do sky painting you need a camera that is capable of taking a time exposure. The pictures below are 15 second exposures with an older digital Canon S5IS. It is a challenge to keep the plane in the picture during the exposure.
I put the camera on a tripod, set the focus to infinity, turn the exposure to 15 seconds and open the aperture to F-3.5. We have learned to watch the plane fly through the camera to know where we have to fly to stay in the picture. We then climb to the top of the frame of the picture area before we start the picture so that we can get our speed up for the aerobatics and aren’t caught in a slow boring climb. We have tried pictures with two planes but they seem to get too cluttered with too many flight paths.
The camera does the calculating and processes the picture but don’t stop there,. Import your picture to an editing program on your computer (like Picassa) and turn the shadows up and play with the light settings. It really dresses up the picture and brightens the lights on the plane. I always take a bunch and throw the ugly ones away.
Night flying is addicting …… Don’t say I didn’t warn you!!!
-Lee
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