I am going to buy a 4*60 sometime in the next few weeks the reason i want this plane is that the wingns are not sheeted allowing me to get some RAM lights and try some night flying. My question is has anyone here tried this and whats it like. thanks paul

I use an older Giant Quaker for night flights. With a yellow fuselage and red wings, it makes it easy to see the big flying "T". The plane was already built prior to trying the Ram lights. The wings have the strands clear taped to the underside which still gives a good red glow.
You need to wait till it's totally dark so you won't loose the plane in the sunset. The hardest part is finding the end of runway on approach. Several ways to solve this are place candles in jars, Coleman lanterns on low setting or glow sticks stuck in the ground at each corner of the runway. You need to have several flashlights with red lenses to see during start-up but not light blind you. It is scary at first but then easy after a few minutes.
One of our club members was flying an AirCore trainer with lights when during mid flight, the lights battery pack fell out of the bottom hatch. With me standing behind him for protection, we tried to follow the noise in the darkness and make as soft of crash as possible. (semi-successful )
I believe there were a coule of threads on here about night flights. Might help to do a search.

There are several guys at my field with night flyers (and I'm going to convert a trainer to it as soon as I have time). I've been out with them several times.

The most popular night flyer here is the Sig LT-40. The wing and tail structure make it nearly ideal.

The best working setups involved taking the covering off the outter most wing bay and the wingtips. Some kind of reflective covering, like chome was put on the inner most rib, and transparent red or green was put on each wingtip, red on the left, green on the right.

No one here uses the Ram system, instead, guys either use ultrabright LEDs (from a website called something like ultrabrightled.com. I haven't checked the url thoug), or using some bright bulbs from radio shack. Usually 2 blubs in each wingtip. You want as little structure outside of the bulbs as possible, so you can see one or both bulbs from any angle, top, bottom, or end-on. And the transparent covering tends to "glow" giving you a big, lit, reference.

The same treatment is given to the vertical tail, with one bulb set inside the vertical, and yellow covering used on the tail.

Keep most of the rest of the plane white. The light coming from the tail tends to hit the horizontal stab, making it visible in some cases, and the light from the wings will help light up parts of the plane as well.

Landing isn't that hard, really. Once the plane gets close to the ground, the bulbs in the wingtips are bright enough to actually light up the ground a little, so you can see when to flair.

Some guys use electronic swtiches on a 5th channel, some just use a switch on the side of the plane.

You really don't want ot power your lights from your RX pack, use a secondary pack. And you need a lot of capacity. Using the lights from RS or LEDs, you can use a 4.8v nicad or nimh pack.

Basic acrobatics look wild, loops and espeically rolls are just really cool.

I've also seen it done with just one light on the plane, on the tail. The guy doing it didn't care if the plane crashed, and had experience flying at night prior. It was pretty funny, really. (and the plane was eventually totalled, but mostly due to the flat spin down to the runway than anything to do with the lights)

Anyway, for your first night flights, the slower the plane flys, the better off you'll be.

You don't have to wait until total dark. Most of the nightflying here just happens as a continuation of the evening flying. Dusk isn't really a problem here. It might have some to do with where the sun sets at your field though.

Another option for premade lights is [link=http://www.curtek.com]Curtek Lighting[/link]. I bought one of their systems last year and put in on a GWS Tiger Moth. At our club field, I'd be too worried about noise complaints to fly a glow plane after dark, but the TM is a perfect solution to getting a night flying fix for me.

We used to fly some up in Keflavik during the summer at midnight. The planes, (and my heli) always showed up extremely well.[8D]

Yes, but that's cheating. And I bet you didn't get much flying in during the rest of the year either.

I was thinking of adding lights to my Avistar and try it.. But I have
enough trouble seeing the plane in the day:-(
We also have a couple of members that fly at nite, Both of them
said they really like the seaplane funflys at lake Havasu and flying
at nite and landing on the water, One of them has landing lights
and he said with the lights on and the reflection off the water it
makes it really easy to land nice and smooth..

barracudahockey.... Keflavik... was it cold??

I was wondering how long it was going to take for someone to catch that.

The winter months were devoid of much usable flying weather.

Cold? No not really it was in the 70's during the summer. Rather pleasant. The problem was flying till 1am and going to work at 7.

Most of the times I was up there was during the summer months. (thank God)