A couple of years ago, I added LED light strips to the sides of a Radian Electric Sailplane. Left side red, right side green. Powered by the same 11.1 v 2200 mAh battery as the plane uses (The BEC circuit cuts the throttle when the voltage gets low, plenty left to glide down, so no problem with the LED's killing the radio gear in mid-flight).
Those LED strips were super-bright! When flying at about 100 feet, the green side actually lit up the ground for hundreds of feet. It was hard to pilot because of the lack of wingtip lights to be able to tell the banking angle, but that was mostly a problem for preparing to land. Added a red and a green "finger light" to the wingtips which helped, but that was a one-shot temporary solution as the batteries in them died before the flying was done for the night, and they were not as bright as the LED strips.
Anyway, as we were flying it, a guy on a motorcycle was driving by. And then he stopped for awhile, and finally rode off again. He clearly had stopped to try to figure out what the heck it was that he was seeing, since from a distance it looked like a bright skinny red or green horizontal light, depending which side you saw. Wish I had some video of it.
- George Gassaway