Airports consists of a variety of lights, all flashing and illuminating in different colors. When it comes to the question of what color airport taxiway lights are, the viewer needs to take one important aspect into account: taxiways aren’t the same as runways. A runway is the paved airstrip used for an aircraft to take off and land whereas a taxiway is a path that connects to a runway. Since runways and taxiways have different purposes, they utilize different colored lights.
Airport taxiway lights are always blue. These lights guide the flight crew and vehicle drivers in low visibility conditions, which includes nighttime operations. In the dark, humans best see the color blue green, which is why taxiway edge lights are blue and centerline lighting is green. Blue taxiway edge lights are typically the first lights an airplane passenger sees. These lights are either elevated, like Hali-Brite’s taxiway lights, or set into the ground.
On the other hand, runway lights range from white, yellow, to red and green. An airport’s choice of runway light configuration depends on their locality’s weather conditions, but the edge lights are almost always white. The lights placed at the last 2000 feet of a runway are yellow. The reason for this is to let pilots know that they’re almost at the end of the runway. Other runway lights include threshold lights, which are green, end lights, which are red, and REILs, or runway end identifier lights, which are bright strobe lights.
Taxiways also consist of several other types of lights, besides traditional blue edge lights, like centerline lights, as briefly mentioned earlier, clearance bar lights, runway guard lights, and stop bar lights. Centerline lights are placed at the center of a taxiway and are green, unless they are where a taxiway crosses a runway, then they’ll alternate between yellow and green. Clearance bar lights are yellow and installed at holding positions or used to indicate an intersecting taxiway. Runway guard lights are also yellow and are used to indicate an active runway. Lastly, stop bar lights are red unidirectional lights embedded in pavement and used so that aircrafts and vehicles don’t inadvertently enter a runway without clearance.
So, simply taxiway lights are blue and the rest of the runway contains a variety of other colors, like white, yellow, red, or green. All airport lighting is important, but edge lights are considered one of the most integral guides for pilots and vehicle drivers during low visibility conditions. Hali-Brite provides a variety of low-intensity elevated runway and taxiway lights. Check out our catalog today and contact us for more information.