Originally Posted by
mldoc
My takeaway from the livestream at about 9:30 last night was that it was a call made by the Solar Impulse team not to have what they termed the "promotional lights" on. It did not sound to me at the time as if this was something that ATC was requesting. There could have been a behind-the-scenes request from ATC or the FAA, but it wasn't presented to the pilot as "the tower says only your landing lights can be on. It is possible that given the technical problem that they had that they did not want to risk drawing additional attention to the aircraft and scare the general public. Also, those lights may have potentially illuminated the dangling fabric making it obvious to the public that there was a "broken plane" flying overhead.
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