Aviation Sourcing Solutions Blog

Across an entire aircraft and the runways it uses, there are too many lights to count, ranging from taxi lights to runway turnoff lights, and more. For a general understanding of what they are used for, the lights on aircraft can be broken down into categories by their colors, functions, and purposes. Throughout a single flight at night, all lights may be used at least once, but at varying stages of flight. For example, taxi lights and runway turnoff lights are typically used when the airplane is on the ground, while anti-collision lights and navigation lights are a must during the whole flight. To help you better distinguish between the different types of lights used by aircraft, this blog will further explore the common groups of lights and their functions. 

Aircraft are highly advanced flying machines, and they feature a wide variety of technology and systems that make them one of the safest ways to travel by far. With large, complex aircraft like Boeing and Airbus wide-body airliners, there are many systems spread across assemblies that are crucial for flight, and having the ability to monitor their health and respond to issues is paramount to avoid any hazards. Generally, pilots and crew members will rely on altering systems such as the EICAS to maintain awareness and safety, and having a general understanding of such systems can be beneficial for anyone involved in the industry or those who hold an interest in aviation.

With the constant demands placed upon general aviation aircraft, it is critical to have a robust ground operations network. With multiple actions needing to be accomplished between flights, owners often look for entities capable of efficiently providing a wide range of services. With the current air transportation model, owners of both private and commercial aircraft have numerous options for ground service operators, but most choose to depend upon a fixed-base operator (FBOs). To provide a better understanding of the role that FBOs play, we will discuss some of the services they offer, as well as the equipment that supports them.

For an aircraft to remain airworthy and safe to operate, it must meet stringent quality guidelines and regulations that focus on part conditions, maintenance, and approval. To prevent damage to various parts and systems and their subsequent failure, aircraft engineers take advantage of a process known as heat treatment. Generally, this process will cover a wide variety of parts ranging from landing gear components to the individual bearings and joints of assemblies, ensuring that they all perform with high reliability and integrity. In this blog, we will discuss the heat treatment of aircraft components, allowing you to better understand how such processes are carried out for a number of items.

For airlines that require high amounts of power for their standard set of operations, having a device that provides energy for functions outside of propulsion can be highly beneficial. Common to large aircraft such as commercial airliners, devices such as Auxiliary Power Units (APU) are regularly used for the vehicle to operate autonomously without the aid of a ground power unit, high pressure air start cart, external air conditioning unit, or other various ground support equipment. In this blog, we will discuss the design and operation of auxiliary power units, allowing you to better understand how they augment the operations of various aircraft.

Aircraft lighting is a crucial aspect of flight safety, ensuring that pilots and passengers have the ability to see their surroundings to safely move around a cabin, interact with controls, and more. Aircraft cockpit lighting and panel lighting solutions in particular serve an extremely important role, providing pilots visibility to efficiently operate and monitor all aircraft instruments, switches, breakers, and more. In this blog, we will discuss the main aspects of aircraft cockpit lighting, allowing you to better understand how pilots maintain safety and control during low visibility conditions and night operations.

Aircraft landing gear can come in a variety of forms, the most common being those that utilize wheels. With a tire and wheel assembly, the entire weight of an aircraft can optimally be supported during takeoff, landing, and taxi procedures. To ensure that even the most massive commercial transporters are supported, wheels are engineered to be extremely strong, yet lightweight. To best understand how the tire and wheel assembly efficiently provides for aircraft ground procedures, one must learn how they are designed and how they function.

Preparing for numerous possible weather conditions is a crucial part of flight planning, and it allows for operators to ensure that flight paths can be optimally made using the most efficient and safe routes. Turbulence is one of the most impactful forces on aircraft parts, often accounting for upwards of $100 million annually for the maintenance and efficiency impacts faced by the general aviation sector in the United States alone. To create optimal flight paths while accounting for weather, technology has consistently advanced to increase the capabilities of weather systems for more accurate and real-time forecasting. In this blog, we will discuss the future of weather systems and how upcoming technologies will improve flight planning.

A transponder is a wireless communications, monitoring, or control device that picks up and automatically responds to an incoming signal. The term is a contraction of the words transmitter and responder. An aviation transponder has multiple interrogation modes, or formats of pulsed sequences from an interrogating Secondary Surveillance (SSR) or similar system. Multiple modes exist, such as modes 1-5 for military use, and modes A-D for civilian use. In this blog, we will discuss everything you need to know about mode C transponders.

While pilots have long relied on electromechanical flight decks and systems in the past, the Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) has quickly grown as a standard for newer models. Rather than feature conventional gauges or dials, the display technology used for the EFIS relies on CRT and LCD screens to group important information together for pilots. As the EFIS continues to grow in use for aircraft, understanding its various components and flight display features can be beneficial to anyone who pilots aircraft or is learning how to fly.