Compared with traditional lighting technologies that used in airports, LED airport lamps dramatically reduce the power consumption and maintenance costs. The LED airport lighting system has been put into use for several years. Manufacturers received positive feedbacks in the aspect of visibility, duration and performances. Via technological improvements and FAA (Federal Aviation Administration)’s endeavors and guidance in promoting LED airport lighting technologies, the compatibility issues have been largely improved.
Most of airport lighting systems are initially designed for incandescent lighting technologies. Therefore, new LED airport lamps could not be compatible with them. However, by replacing part of the electricity infrastructure and replacing incandescent lights by LED lamps, the energy efficiency and reliability can be increased greatly.
Although the production cost of LED lamps is much higher than that of incandescent lamps, after several years’ using, the saving energy consumption and maintenance cost will bring back rewords. The maintenance cost of LED airport lighting system will be much lower than that of incandescent lighting system.
Light-emitting Diodes (LEDs) are more and more widely used in security-related occasions, including evacuation signs (Boyce 1994), road traffic signs (Conwayand Bullough 1999), automotive brake and turn signal (Olson 1987), street lighting (Radetsky2010) and airport lighting applications. LEDs’ characteristics made these lamps are rather popular in visual signal applications.
Currently, most of airports are still using incandescent bulbs, the service life of which is much shorter that of LED lamps. The standard lifetime of incandescent bulbs is around several thousand hours (Bullough 2000), while the average lifetime of LED lights can reach up to 50,000 hours. In the meanwhile, LED lamps have higher luminous efficiency (lm/W) than that of incandescent bulbs and consume less power. Due to the over-low light efficiency of incandescent lights, the launch of EISA in 2007 speeded up the process of replacing incandescent lighting products with other lighting technologies. The launching of EISA did not directly affect airport lighting projects, but with the acceleration of incandescent lights’ elimination, LED airport lamps became a hot topic recently. However, the compatibility problem may be the biggest obstacle for the widely using of led tunnel light in airports. Besides, the narrow bandwidth of LED waves means that they cannot generate infrared rays, which are helpful in ice melting in cold days.