Things To Know About Different Airfield Lighting Systems

Posted by JamesPark493 on March 8th, 2017

Have you visited a major airport in the dark hours? If yes, then you must have noticed a few important things associated with the lighting at an airport. First of all most, if not all the parts of an airport or an airfield, have different forms of lights - flashing white lights, steady red, or pulsating yellow lights. All these lights put together are definitely very important for proper aircraft operation at night, but why are there so many different kinds of lights? And what do these colors stand for? It is important to understand that every airfield or airport has four major types of lights - general lighting, approach lighting, taxiway lighting, and runway lighting.

From the perspective of an airport operations team, it is very important to hire airfield lighting systems services that know what kind of lighting systems are required for different parts of the area? In addition, it is very important for these people to have experience in installing all these types as well. We will discuss about general airport lighting and runway lighting in this piece.

Let’s begin with general lighting. These lights generally include airport beacon and other red or white beacon lights that can be seen on top of buildings, construction equipment, and towers. These are very powerful and large rotating lights that are highly visible, and can be seen miles away from the airport. Beacon lights can either be set on a timer or can be turned on and off by air traffic controllers. All buildings, tall equipment, and towers on an airfield will always be fitted with a small red beacon on top. This is done to avoid collision with low flying aircraft.

There are different types of runway lights. Runway end identifier lights or REILs are a couple of white flashing lights that are helpful in identifying the runway at night. Approach end of the runway has one of these lights on each side. Then there are runway edge lighting systems that are again divided into low intensity, high intensity, and medium intensity lights. These are steady white that are installed on the edges of runways. Other runway lights include runway centerline lighting system or RCLS, touchdown zone lights or TDZL, takeoff hold light array or THL, runway intersection lights or RILs, etc. Now, if you need an airfield runway lighting contractor to help you install some or all of these lights, you should make sure they they are well aware of what’s needed from them. Wrong lights at the wrong place could spell danger!

Author’s Bio: The author is a blogger. This article is about airfield lighting systems.

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JamesPark493

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JamesPark493
Joined: August 6th, 2014
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