Whelen Aerospace Technologies

Whelen Aerospace Technologies (WAT) is an aircraft lighting manufacturer with facilities at 51 Winthrop Road, Chester, Connecticut and 210 Airport Drive East, Sebastian, Florida. It is a division of Whelen Engineering, whose founder George W. Whelen III built the first rotating aircraft anti-collision beacon in Deep River, Connecticut in 1952. Whelen Engineering's aviation division and LoPresti Aviation merged in 2019 to form WAT, and WAT acquired AeroLEDs in 2024. The company designs and makes LED and HID lighting for general aviation, business jets, turboprops, helicopters and airport vehicles, and supplies lighting to aircraft OEMs.

Products

• LED wingtip and tail lights, including the Orion series position and anti-collision lights.
• LED landing, taxi and recognition lights, including the Parmetheus G3 PAR 36 lights, now also approved for Part 25 aircraft.
• LED beacons, infrared lighting and interior lighting.
• HID landing and taxi light kits, made for specific aircraft from single engine pistons to airliners.
• LED kits for jets and turboprops: Citation, Learjet, Challenger, Dassault, Gulfstream, Pilatus and Hawker models.
• Legacy products: strobe tubes and power supplies, and spare parts for older Whelen lighting.
• Legacy LoPresti mod parts such as the Comanche air filter and replacement Zip Tip lenses.
• Airport vehicle lighting (AVL): beacons, lightbars and work lights for ground support equipment.

Cirrus

WAT keeps a Cirrus Aircraft Lighting collection on its website. It sells HID landing lights for the Cirrus SR20, SR22 and SR22T, an Orion 600 series forward and tail wingtip light listed as Cirrus aircraft specific, slide-in Tri-Tip wingtip landing lights for Cirrus aircraft, and a Cirrus SR2X Prodigy LED upgrade that the site describes as STC approved. The Tri-Tip lite is a drop-in HID replacement for aircraft with factory LED wingtip recognition lights (G3 to G5). For G1 and G2 aircraft, or owners who want more spill light, the Tri-Tip modification means sending the existing wingtips to the company's facility to be cut and fitted with an 85 W HID light in each tip.

Approvals and manufacturing

• FAA PMA supplements, STC documents and installation manuals are published on the site, plus a list of reseller STC kits built around WAT products.
• The site lists SAE, AMECA, FAA and TSO certifications and an on-site test lab for dust, moisture and vibration.
• Manufacturing uses CNC machining, injection moulding, sheet metal and surface mount electronics in house. Whelen Engineering runs four manufacturing facilities totalling over one million square feet.

Contact

Description from the company's website (October 2026). Not a Cirrus Aircraft authorized service center. Is this your company? Claim this page to add photos and keep your details up to date.