Airplanes have lots of lights. Some coloured bulbs on the wingtips, some strobe bulbs all over, lots of little lights inside the cockpit to keep instruments lit at night, plus a taxi light and a landing light. The landing light is an unusually large and powerful bulb because its purpose is to illuminate the ground/runway when landing at night. Therefore, it puts out a lot of juice (250W on GXRP), and not-coincidentally has a relatively short lifespan (20-50 hours).

As it turns out, airplane owners in Canada and the US are permitted to perform some repairs without getting a mechanic involved, and replacing a landing light is one of them. Without a landing light, in Canada one is not supposed to carry passengers at night. Since GXRP’s landing light burned out the other day, and I have a Hope Air night flight planned soon, off I went to find a replacement, and set things right. Luckily John Cabaco’s crew at Island Air had some spares.

Installing the bulb ended up taking almost an hour. A transparent plastic “windshield” underneath the bulb had to be removed, but while loosening its screws, I realized that putting that part back on may be tricky. That’s because screws from the bottom mate with a metal rail very loosely attached to the top (inside) side of the plastic panel, and that rail is not reachable from the outside. There was however a circular access port above the landing light cavity, leading into the nose of the airplane. This access port was covered by a piece of carpet, and in turn covered by the weather radar dish. So all that stuff had to be loosened and moved out of the way before that access port could be opened. With it all opened up, putting in the new bulb (GE 4522) was no problem. Screwing the plastic windshield back on indeed required some concurrent prodding from the access port above. Putting the radar dish bracket back exactly where it was took yet more time. Some pictures are available, including one the inside of the nose cone, with weather radar dish and access port visible, and another with the nose and landing light area, seen from the bottom.

But it’s done, the work officially logged, and now GXRP is legal to carry passengers at night again.

Update 2007-03: GXRP’s landing light got upgraded to the XeVision HID 50W system. It’s been on day & night, for hundreds of hours. Works great.