all to replace a perfectly good light bulb...

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Yeah.... sorta silly. Which is the same thing they said when that fragile,
expensive Edison lamp was used to replace a perfectly good gas light, which
provided a nice white light, if it was the mantle type. Or even kerosene. Or
earlier candles.

But the tricky bit with nav lights --- or traffic lights --- is the fact you
can't wait until they burn out. The whole idea of having them is for them to
be there ALL THE TIME.

So you make them as reliable as possible then replace them BEFORE they can burn
out.

To make a filament type lamp more reliable you either increase the
cross-section of the filament or reduce its operating temperature. The former
dictates more current, the latter less light output.

The output of aviation nav lights for light planes has never been carved in
stone but the trend has been for brighter lights. Back in the Good Ol' Days,
whenever that was, a three candle-power lamp was considered good enough.
Nowadays the lamps are running 50 candlepower. To get 50-cp of light from a
rough-duty filament, you gotta feed the thing quite a bit of power.

Regular Grimes wing lights use that flat-sided lamp with the built-in
reflector. Nowadays they list for about twenty bucks although most folks sell
them for less. That's a good, reliable lamp. But you still replace them every
hundred hours or whatever, because the whole idea is that you don't want to be
doping around at night without nav lights. Makes you get lost or something.
So you don't wait for them to burn out and THEN replace them, you replace those
perfectly good (but 100 hour old) lamps with spiffy new lamps. And if your
uncle Sam is paying the bill, you never even think about it.

But if you DO ever come to think about it, mebbe a set of nav lights that NEVER
has to be replaced isn't such a bad idea after all, even if the set costs you
$250 bucks. Because the last time I checked, Grimes wing light fixture goes
for about $75. Tail light, too. So you're already up to $225 and those
suckers weigh a bit more than a handful of LED's, use ten dollar light bulbs
and suck three times the power as that handful of LED's.

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But I'm with you. ...all to replace a perfectly good bulb. And you still
run the risk of having some BUF run you down if you're silly enough to try
threading the VFR corridor over LA, day or night, even when you're blinking and
flashing and painted International Orange and have ten thousand dollars of
FAA-mandated equipment screwed to the panel.

Them kerosene lamps is sounding better every day.

-R.S.Hoover