LED Lighting Approval
I want to replace the taxi lights on my Piper Malibu with LED equivalents. This seems to be quite the grey area. My airplane came from the factory with the Whelen A775 series recognition/taxi lights. There is no TSO or PMA for these units because Piper approves the installation under the original type design. Whelen recently introduced the 71888 series, which are fit, form and functional equivalents to the original A775. It would be a simple installation because I could literally just drop them in place of the old lights. The problem is that these aren’t TSO’d and Whelen apparently has no intention of getting a TSO for them because there is no TSO for recognition/taxi lights. So how do you go about legally installing them? Getting a one-time field approval would be the only way, but how do you do that with so little technical data to justify it to the FSDO?
