High Visibility Paint Schemes

On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:11:07 -0700, Uncle Fuzzy wrote:

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I wonder about painting the undersides of wings and tail black while
leaving the rest of the glider white. That should stay cool while
showing up well against anything except ice and snow.

I like that idea, except that Black is boring. A nice rich RED is very
close to black in grey scale value, and so much less boring. You've
probably noted as much while looking up chasing runaway FF models.

The best scheme for FF I've used is black undersides on the inner panels
and dayglo orange top and bottom on the tips. The inner panel top colour
doesn't matter much. I've used yellow, scarlet and white - all are
equally good. However, the both the black inners and the orange tips show
up really well against any sky and, as a bonus, the orange tips are
highly visible on the ground as well. The pictures he

http://www.gregorie.org/freeflight

are a bit washed out, but do show why I like the scheme. I don't think
the dayglo works as well on a sailplane because a lot of its visibility
comes from light shining through the translucent wing covering and
powering up the dayglo[*].

A friend uses purple inners and yellow/green dayglo. The yellow/green is
pretty good but I don't think the purple is as visible in the air as
black.
[*] the reason that dayglo always looks so bright is that it absorbs
ultraviolet and visible wavelengths of light and uses the energy to
fluoresce, so it actually is brighter than other colours. Under more than
a few feet of water almost all light is blue-green but even here orange
dayglo fluoresces orange. Panels of it have been used to improve the
colour balance of underwater photographs.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |