I am making some custom runway lights.
Then a scale animation with distance almost certainly won't do what you need.
Lights are really complicated, because their brightness in the scene is governed by
two regimes - if they're larger than a pixel, the radius of the disc gives you an indication of the brightness, but if they're just a single pixel, then the transparency of that pixel is the parameter to change for brightness.
Furthermore, the apparent brightness depends on the light in the rest of the scene - a 100 W bulb carries quite some distance in a moonless night, but isn't particularly visible in bright daylight.
None of that you can really implement with any kind of model/animation combination, at best you can make approximately sure your light is always larger than a single pixel (though that depends on screen resolution just as well) and isn't rasterized away - but for even a halfway plausible light in the scene you need GLSL code to do the computations (we have the procedural light shader for just that purpose).