Dave wrote: "It maybe a daft question, but why can't strobe lights be made bright enough to see during the strongest daylight conditions?
And isn't the most conspicuous colour for an aircraft supposed to be black?"
Strobe lights can be made very powerful indeed, but then that may cause problems from them being too bright under certain conditions. Also, they require a fair bit of electrical power, which is something that the average microlight (or quite a few light aircraft) doesn't have in abundance.
As for paint schemes, I was involved in the air ranges high conspicuity colour scheme trials about twenty odd years ago. Prior to that we had always painted things we wanted to see clearly flourescent orange or yellow. We discovered that high contrast was the key, and a mix of black and white was far and a away the best scheme for flight over all terrains, including the sea. The RAF did a similar trial for the training fleet, with the result that they changed their aircraft over to black, as this shows up best when looking against the sky (range requirements meant that often we wanted to see things against the ground or sea as well). I can vouch for the fact that all black isn't very good if you're looking down at them beneath you flying up the glens though!
Last edited by VP959; 7th Jul 2004 at 19:40.