4.10 Support & Bug Reporting

[TheGrunch]

The main thing that I would say about the landing lights on the actual aircraft is that they don't really seem to actually light anything up except the side of your aircraft, making them utterly pointless. There's currently not much use for them even in pitch darkness other than to make your position very obvious. You can see this simply by sitting on the runway in darkness and turning on the landing lights. No visible effect on the lighting of the terrain can be seen. Not really an issue in pre 4.10 versions, but now that we have real dark nights it would be nice to have lights that actually light up terrain.

[PE_Tigar]

My last 2 cents on landing lights - they do have some effect in Il-2, but much smaller than in RL. In real airplanes landing without a working landing light in the night is considered an emergency procedure, and in anything faster and less sturdy then a small piston airplane it is very tricky (unless you have radar altimeter, that can be useful). Frankly, in B-25 mission I practiced over and over, the bigger problem were the invisible runway lights. You do need some visibility even for precision approaches nowadays, CAT I (which is basically what we have for B-25s) calls for 200 feet vertical and 550m RVR/800m visibility. Though if I had an option to either risk it and follow an imperfect GS all the way to the ground, or ditch in the South Pacific, I would take my chances with the approach .

Also, I can't remember anyone answering the questions I had in the beginning - what is the glideslope angle used and how far from the runway I need to be for the "tower" to activate the runway lights (and if this value can somehow be changed by mission builders)?