Been in a new car showroom lately? You’ll be hard pressed to find a lowly incandescent bulb in so much as a dome light. The same is true for new aircraft. Not many are sporting old-school filament lamps for landing, taxi and position lights. As a byproduct of an avalanche of LED manufacturing, we’ve found more applications for these lamps than ever for legacy aircraft.
If you can’t find the exact replacement for that old GE burner in your wing mount, stick around. It’ll be along pretty soon. And the new products are brighter and more efficient than the previous versions and in many cases, they consume less power than first-gen LEDs did.