 Yehudi lights fitted to engine cowling and leading edges of a Grumman TBM-3D Avenger | |
| Keywords | Active camouflage Counter-illumination |
|---|---|
| Project type | Military research |
| Funding agency | US Navy |
| Objective | Make brightness of aircraft match their backgrounds |
| Duration | 1943 – 1945 |
Yehudi lights are lamps of automatically controlled brightness placed on the front and leading edges of an aircraft to raise the aircraft's luminance to the average brightness of the sky, a form of active camouflage using counter-illumination. They were designed to camouflage the aircraft by preventing it from appearing as a dark object against the sky.
The technology was developed by the US Navy from 1943 onwards, to enable a sea-search aircraft to approach a surfaced submarine to "within 30 seconds of flying time"[1] before becoming visible to the submarine's crew. This in turn enabled the aircraft to engage the submarine with depth charges before it could dive, to counter the threat from German submarines to allied shipping. The concept was based on earlier research by the Royal Canadian Navy in its diffused lighting camouflage project.
Yehudi lights were unused in the war and were made obsolete by advanced postwar radar. With 1970s improvements in stealth technology, they again attracted interest.