LED IR-Visible Landing and Search Light is a steerable helicopter light featuring a ‘dual-mode’ capability, including both visible LED and covert infrared LED modes, in a ready-to-use configuration, providing excellent and uncompromised performance in all operational environments.

Situational awareness and target identification are crucial elements for any mission and nighttime is a further challenge for helicopters engaged in NVIS mode operations and requiring illumination. Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology is the most reliable and delivers much better light intensity. However, using a bright, visible light for landing and search operations is not suitable for covert operations where a helicopter is aiming to remain undetected.

For covert operations, Leonardo has designed a landing and search light that, in addition to providing a standard visible light beam, uses infrared LEDs to create a beam of IR energy.

This is invisible to the naked eye but can be picked up by a helicopter crew’s night vision equipment, allowing the aircraft to maintain a low profile while conducting operations. The search light is low power and is embedded into the light main equipment for short/medium range SAR-CSAR operations.

The light features an IR mode with dimming capability to easily adapt to different distances of area to be illuminated, avoiding to reduce the NVIS goggle capabilities in case of close proximity target illumination with high intensity of IR energy.

Using the LED IR-Visible Landing & Search Light, customers can benefit not only from unparalleled performance in each mode, customers can, most importantly, switch from visible mode to IR mode without any set-up, thus increasing mission readiness,
flexibility and safety for the crew.