Downloaded aircraft have no passenger cabin lights at night in FS—how do I fix this?

Cabin lighting in FS aircraft is usually one of three things

Most downloads don’t actually have a “real” passenger cabin light system. In FS (FS9/FSX/P3D), cabin illumination at night typically comes from either:

• a night texture (texture_LM) that makes the cabin windows/glow look lit, and/or
• an effect light attached via aircraft.cfg ( [lights] section), and/or
• modeling: the VC/cabin has emissive polygons + proper materials. If the model wasn’t built with it, no config tweak can truly “add” it.

So the first step is figuring out which kind of “cabin lights” you mean: lit passenger windows from outside, or an actually illuminated interior you can see inside.

Checklist 1: Identify what you’re trying to achieve

• From outside: you want cabin windows glowing at night (common on airliners).
• Inside view: you want the passenger cabin to light up when you switch on something (rare unless the model includes a cabin/interior).

If it’s the inside passenger cabin: many freeware aircraft simply don’t have a modeled passenger cabin or don’t have materials set up for it. In that case there’s nothing to “turn on” via panel.cfg or aircraft.cfg beyond crude effect lights.

Checklist 2: Quick checks you can do in-sim

1) Make sure you’re actually seeing any lighting commands work

• At night, try the standard toggles: NAV, BEACON, STROBE, and LANDING.
• Then try the cockpit/instrument lighting (depends on aircraft). Some add-on panels use custom switches, but many freeware ones don’t drive cabin lighting at all.

2) Confirm the aircraft has night textures

• Open the aircraft’s texture folder(s) and look for files that end with _LM (or sometimes “_L” depending on author conventions).
• If there are no _LM textures for the exterior model, the windows will often stay dead-dark at night unless the model uses effect lighting.

Checklist 3: If you’re trying to add “window glow” (most common)

A) Verify the model references the night maps
Even if you “added nighttime cabin lights to the texture file,” it only works if:

• the texture name matches what the model expects, and
• the author set the material to use the night map channel.

If the model doesn’t call night textures, you can paint all day and it still won’t show at night.

B) Compare with a livery/texture set that works
If the same aircraft has another repaint where windows glow at night, compare that texture folder against yours:

• Are the _LM files present?
• Same exact filenames?
• Same format (DDS vs BMP) as the rest of that aircraft’s textures?

Checklist 4: If you’re trying to fake cabin lighting with effects

You can add light effects in the [lights] section, but two big caveats:

• If the aircraft model has no interior/cabin, you’ll only get an external “glow blob,” not a lit cabin.
• Light type/placement depends heavily on the sim (FS9 vs FSX/P3D) and the effect file used. If the effect isn’t present, nothing shows.

Also, it’s normal that there is no lights section in panel.cfg. For most aircraft, panel.cfg isn’t where cabin lighting is defined.

The big reality check

If “just about every aircraft” you download is missing cabin lights, that points to either:

• you’re expecting an interior cabin feature most freeware models don’t include, or
• you’re missing night textures/effects (or they’re not being used by the model), or
• you’re testing at night but the aircraft has no night mapping set up in the model.

A few targeted questions so we can nail it down

• Which sim are you on exactly: FS2004 (FS9), FSX boxed/Steam, or Prepar3D (which version)?
• When you say “passenger cabin lights,” do you mean (1) glowing cabin windows from outside, or (2) an actually lit passenger cabin interior view?
• Name one specific aircraft from Simviation (make/model) that’s doing it, and tell us if there are any _LM texture files in its texture folder.
• Are these aircraft showing any lights at all (nav/beacon/landing), or only the cabin is missing?

Answer those and I’ll tell you the most realistic fix for your case (night textures vs effects vs “can’t be done with that model”).