CHAPTER 8Make Your Plane Look Good at Night

Night flyers are entities with a super powerful impact on human perception. There has to be some vestigial part of the human brain that harkens back to when we were tiny mammals very worried about what might swoop down from the night skies and eat us. In Manhattan, an alien portal to dimension X could open on Broadway, and people would assume that it was just some marketing stunt—but fly a bit of electroluminescent wire (el-wire) with a wiggly tail 50 feet up, and you introduce jaded New Yorkers to the notion of awe and curiosity. There’s nothing like it.

Overall Considerations

There are lots of different ways to illuminate an aircraft. Illumination has to satisfy two criteria: (1) It must convey to ...

Get DIY RC Airplanes from Scratch now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.