Strobe Lights

Not as simple as it looks!

Strobes are a key collision avoidance item for an aircraft and there are many home builts that don't have them for one reason or another from what information I gathered when I pondered whether or not to add them to our ship. We weren't going to have them until much later until we learned how many mid air collisions there were involving ships without them.

On rotorcraft I think they're even more necessary than a plane just for use as a people repeller if nothing else. When you start up a helicopter there are many areas you can't see and with the blades turning and barely visible it becomes a very dangerous machine to be around.

Our little ships can't really handle having them running at startup but they should be turned on prior to starting the engine or as soon as possible after it gets going and left on until the blades have totally come to a stop at shutdown. Safety is not only number one to you but to others around you as well.

First thing we had to decide was how many strobes we were going to have

so we could decide on which power pack we needed. We decided on 3, one for the top of the tail boom and 1 on each side of the ship. To date we still haven't installed the side strobes because we can't find what we've got in mind.  The strobes that are built into the side Nav Lights are ugly and we're worried they may reflect on the inside of our windshield. One belly strobe would pretty much solve the problem but it will also keep up from installing the helipac option RotorWay offers at a later date.  We could install it way forward but that's too close to the Com radio and the transponder which calls for the strobes to be no closer then 3 feet from them.  What we'd like to have is some that are built into the forward corners of nose of the ship just below where the door posts meet the windshield at the bottom.  I thought I saw something like that on Doug Bush's ship one year but it turned out they were just some lights Doug had installed.

Next was where to locate the strobe pack. We called Tom Smith at RotorWay and he recommended mounting it above the pilot on the back of the seat back for CG reasons.

My thoughts were

A.   As heavy as the thing is I didn't want that thing coming through the roof into my head in the event of a hard landing.

B.   I didn't like the idea of it being so close to the overhead switch panel and our panel powered headset power units.

What we ended up doing was installing it on the back of the pilots side seatback access panel. It's a pain to have to unhook the plug ins from the power pack when we have to remove the panel but it was about the only place we could think of to mount it that wouldn't put it to close to something it could inject interference into.  After we got that installed the next thing was figuring out where to run the wires for it which wasn't too much of a problem to do.  Next we installed a switch on the cyclic to toggle the forward strobe lights off in the event we got into some haze or when we were landing to keep us from going gaga when the forward ones started reflecting back at us from the ground and rotor blades. Some ships have the bottoms of the rotor blades painted flat black for this very reason.

We had an issue with them after we were all done and had to come up with a fix.

After we had the ship completely wired we tested everything powering the ship with a regulated 10 amp power supply. All was well so we wrapped up the harnesses and attached them to the frame tubes. When we were done and the time came to install the battery into the ship we discovered an unusual popping sound in the headsets from the strobe unit.  We did everything short of installing noise filters in the power line and discovered that if we ran a power wire directly from the battery to the strobe pac the noise was gone. Well this barks, all our harnesses are closed up and it would be a major undertaking to unwrap them.  What we ended up doing was using an extra switch in the overhead switch panel as a master power switch for it. We moved the main feed off the terminal strip and ran it to an extra wire I had installed in the run from the switch panel to the front of the ship for whatever we installed in the future.  That did the trick and got rid of our pesky noise plus it allowed us to have the grip switches to be powerless as long as all the switches in the overhead panel were off. In the end it worked out even better then the original plan.

By the way the red side of the lens goes forward

Another thing to mention is be sure to use a shielded strobe lens on the light if its going to be anywhere close to any antennas, I think they called for a distance of 5 feet but it may be 3 feet I'm not sure now. Its pretty hard on a small helicopter to comply with all the wants and whims of the manufacturers and you'll find yourself defying just about every rule they tell you from running the wires to mounting the hardware.

The only defense you have is use high quality shielded wire
and be sure to only ground the shield at one end and not both
or is it my understanding you'll render the shield useless and pick up big time interference.

Landing and Strobe Indicators Lights

END