February 13, 2025

We Ride At Night

“Our aircraft is designed to do real world missions so it's important that we fly at night. Our customers don't shut their operations down at night.” –Kyle Clark

We built the CX300 to be a mission-driven workhorse that could fly for customers reliably and with minimum maintenance. Having instrument flight rules (IFR) capability was something we knew we would implement from the start. Exterior lighting is part of the certification requirement to operate the aircraft in day, night and all weather conditions.

Like everything we design at BETA, our lighting system design philosophy was driven by simplicity and elegance, delivered in the most lightweight, compact and power efficient form factor. For our components, we partnered with Whelen Aerospace Technologies, a leader in aircraft lighting ((https://flywat.com/ and Instagram @fly_wat).

“If it hurts your eyes, you're too close…”

Safety is always at the forefront, for anyone in or around our plane. Compared to conventionally-fueled aircraft engines, electric engines make less noise and provide nearly instant propeller spin at startup. To reduce potential hazards to ground personnel, the CX300 is equipped with a visual means to indicate the potential for commanded torque to the pusher propeller. Because the pilot can command the propeller to start spinning at any moment after the high voltage system is connected, the aircraft has a supplemental ground recognition light at the root of the tail strike skid, forward of the pusher propeller. The illuminated area indicates a hazard zone to ground personnel, providing a visual alert that pusher propeller spin may occur. The bright red beacon is the mitigation—if it hurts your eyes, you're too close…

For collision avoidance and aircraft position indication, the CX300 aircraft uses a wingtip-mounted light set. With the anticollision (white strobe) lights and position lights integrated into one unit, these lights offer the simplest and the lowest weight solution. The left-side-red, right-side-green and rear-white position lights indicate the airplane orientation on the ground and while in flight. Importantly, these wingtip lights meet the very prescriptive regulatory performance criteria, and are authorized under the FAA’s Technical Standard Orders (TSOs) to have the right colors, intensities and fields of view.

Working with pilots

As aviators, we never miss an opportunity to work closely with the hundreds of pilots on staff here at BETA to elicit feedback on our designs. From the first prototype to the final locked design we made sure our lighting choices were intuitive to pilots. During the lighting development phase, the Final Assembly Line full-scale was used to prototype and evaluate our lighting components. In our production facility, the Development and Industrial Design teams worked with a number of test pilots to conduct a dark hangar lighting study. The emphasis was on the Human Factors aspects of lighting such as landing/taxi light location, glare and adequate fields of view for ground operations. Because our aircraft will be used in a variety of environments, locations and missions, the supplemental ground recognition light was a main focus during this night evaluation. Specific attention was given to the evaluation of the supplemental ground recognition light, ensuring its performance with adequate fields of view to assure ground crew safety, while also meeting the overall Industrial Design aesthetic.

At the front of the plane, installed on the nose landing gear and behind a transparency, we have a dual-mode landing/taxi light to support night operations. Having one unit with two lighting configurations has been a game changer in simplifying the design.

We designed the lighting controls to be accessible to both pilot and training pilot, providing a quick, low-workload method to change light modes (landing/taxi) and toggle lights during critical phases of flight, such as takeoff, approach, and landing.

A lot of teamwork went into designing, prototyping, and testing the lighting on the CX300. From the early concepts and design phase, to prototyping and flight evaluations on our proof-of-concept aircraft (N250UT), everything came together for a smooth installation and immediate functionality on N916LF, the first aircraft off our rate production line.