To be practical and safe you should have the nav lights and anti-collision lights on separate breakers, or fuses, and with separate switches. With strobes, in particular, it is important to have a separate switch to turn them off if you wind up in a cloud and you have the flash coming back in your eyes, like driving in the fog with your high beams on. A common ground is fine.
Most people also have the instrument lights on the same switch as the nav lights. It makes sense and that is how I have wired planes in the past. Last week I took my first night flight in my Midget Mustang and had a problem with my nav lights blowing the breaker and taking out my instrument lights at the same time. It is no fun at all making a first night landing in a plane without being able to see your airspeed. Fortunately for me the previous owner put the nav and instrument lights on the same breaker, but different switches so I was able to turn off the nav lights and reset the breaker and decrease the pucker factor a whole lot. The tower wasn't happy about it, but I am in one piece. Brian Kraut Engineering Alternatives, Inc. www.engalt.com -----Original Message----- From: krnet-boun...@mylist.net [mailto:krnet-boun...@mylist.net]On Behalf Of Oscar Zuniga Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 2:41 PM To: kr...@mylist.net Subject: KR> lighting systems I know some of this has been hashed out here before, but I was reading an article in Sport Aviation last night and saw a statement I had not seen before. The statement was that nav lights have to be wired independently from anti-collision lights. Purpose being that if something smokes, you don't go completely dark to the outside world. What I'm wondering is how far the separation of wiring should be. For example, it is easy to run a common ground out the wing or to the tail for both systems, but it would seem that that approach would not comply and that separate grounds (DC negative) wires should be run for each system, back to the main ground bus. The discussion here (and other lists concerned with experimentals) is that our systems and lighting need not comply with TSO's for equipment nor approved materials for installation. I do think we all agree that best practices should be followed, therefore my question. Comments-? Oscar Zuniga San Antonio, TX mailto: taildr...@hotmail.com website at http://www.flysquirrel.net _______________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@mylist.net please see other KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html
