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I swore the chase light on our King Air was doing its job until I stood in the hangar at 2am in Wichita
I used to think anti collision light timing was one of those things you just sign off and move on. Then last month I was at a shop in Wichita doing a night check and watched a guy with a stopwatch time the flash pattern on three different planes, and mine was off by almost half a second. Turns out a dirty connector was making it strobe uneven, which is the kind of thing you never catch in daylight. I always figured a light is either on or off, and that was that. Curious if anyone here carries a stopwatch or phone app for flash timing, or do you just eyeball it like I did for years?
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miles_grant359d ago
The stopwatch thing got me thinking about something nobody really talks about, and that is how LED replacements mess with the timing too. A lot of shops swap out old strobes for LEDs and just wire them into the same flasher, but the load is totally different so the pulse rate drifts. I had a 182 come in where the tail beacon was flashing at like 38 times a minute when it should have been closer to 45, and the owner had no clue because who counts flashes sitting in the runup area. The other piece is that uneven strobing is actually a clue about bigger stuff, a bad ground or a corroded pin can show up as a weird flash before it ever fails completely. So the timing thing is less about passing some check and more about catching a connection that is on its way out.
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