I have caught some things on preflight and engine start-up that potentially could have made for a very bad day, so from that perspective, particularly on older airplanes, the effort is not wasted.
I do think that with modern technology newer designs could have simpler start up procedures with more self-diagnosing of problems.
I could also argue that drivers of ground vehicles paying a little more attention to their vehicles could also make ground transport safer, but since the potential penalties for careless operation tend to be smaller for ground vehicles there is not the same incentive.
I lived in Gary for 20 years… and Detroit, another infamous city, for 18… and Chicago for 15… Yeah, big cities have hazards. The particular part of Gary where this happened was not the most dangerous, and there are parts of Detroit and Chicago (and Gary, too) I’d be far, far more afraid to have a breakdown.
But it was 1 am. It was VERY dark, dark enough that an unlighted vehicle, or pedestrian attempting to walk somewhere, could easily be hit because they simply couldn’t be seen.
And yeah, even though it was a relatively good neighborhood, Bad Things could still happen.
Master switch & Alternator ON: Enables the electrical system. Cars have things on all the time, such as the clock. But they are used frequently and it doesn’t matter if the battery is drained a little. Aircraft can sit for weeks without being flown. Leave the radios or other things on, and you’ll drain the battery.
Mixture RICH: Cars operate within a fairly limited range of altitudes. As you go higher, atmospheric pressure decreases so you need less fuel to maintain the proper fuel/air ratio. For best economy, you want the mixture as lean as you can get it and still have the engine run smoothly. On take-off, you care more about the engine running than how much fuel it uses; so you use a rich mixture until you get to your cruising altitude where you can lean the mixture. I think of the mixture control as ‘reverse choke’. Older cars needed to be ‘choked’ to start them when they’re cold. Pull the choke knob, and you enrichen the mixture. In aircraft, it’s ‘pull lean’ instead of ‘pull rich’.
Prime AS NECESSARY: You need to squirt a little fuel into the engine to start it when it’s cold. (As stated above, you also want a rich mixture.)
Throttle ON ¼ INCH: You need to set the throttle so that the cold engine will idle when it’s started.
Switch START: Turning the key (or pulling the starter in older planes) engages the starter just like in a car.
Once started, you need to check that you have oil pressure. You also need to let the engine warm up. Realising you have no oil pressure, or that a cold engine can be balky after you’ve left the ground can be suboptimal. That’s also why you do a run-up before taking off. You check the magnetos to make sure they are both operating. Aircraft have two magnetos in case one of them fails so that the engine will keep running. You check the carburettor heat too in case you need it to prevent icing.
As others have said, aviation is very conservative and you need to prove to the FAA that a new design isn’t going to kill people. Reciprocating aircraft engines are basically 1930s designs, so you have to do the extra steps people commonly did in their cars at the time. My '66 MGB doesn’t have magnetos (my '73 and '76 Yamahas did, as does my lawnmower), but you do have to manually pull a knob to choke the engine to start it when it’s cold.
The F-35 is supposedly the easiest aircraft in the Air Force to start up. Almost as easy as a car. According to this page,
Engine start-up [for the F-35] is highly automated, requiring just three switch selections, one each for the battery, integrated power pack, and the engine. Only two selections are required for a hot start.
Incidentally, shutting down the engine is different too. In a car, you turn the key to the Off position. In an aircraft, you pull the mixture control to ‘idle cutoff’. In a couple of seconds, the fuel in the carburettor us burned and the engine starves to a stop. Then you turn the switch off. Starving the engine of fuel can prevent you getting your head chopped off. If there is fuel in the system and the switch is accidentally left on or there is an electrical short, one or both of the magnetos may be ‘hot’ and moving the propeller may initiate ignition. Not a big problem on a car, but possibly deadly on an airplane.
To add a bit to what Broomstick said, it’s not entirely about the specific checks on the check list. It’s also about attention to detail. Maybe that light on the panel isn’t normally on, or is on at the wrong point in the procedure or maybe that control doesn’t move quite right. These are little things that may or may not be a specific check but could be indicative of a larger problem. And that potential problem could cost lives and that’s why there is a lengthy procedure. To suss out those problems before they become fatal.
I think Broomstick and DorkVader have it. If you were to automate things to the point that the aircraft starts up as easily as a modern day passenger car, all that checking and diagnostic work the pilot normally does would no longer be necessary. Then the pilot would be in the mindset that this flight, like all others, would be routine and perhaps their focus on the job at hand would be diminished to the point of danger. I mean, we all see inattentive drivers on the road, right? One might say that we (engineers) make the driving experience so easy that we’re facilitating distracted driving. But it’s a leading cause of crashes.
Doing the same for the much more dangerous and complex process of flying may have the unintended consequence of lulling the pilot into a false sense that everything is OK, nothing to worry about, because is so easy to lose focus with all these focusing steps removed. OTOH I can envision an even more automated flying experience where the pilot is completely disengaged from the flying, sort of like a driverless car. In that case, why even call this person a pilot?
Had a further thought, cars, specially modern cars with all the whizbang electronics and AI do actually do an involved prestart check list of things that could damage the car(engine drive line electronics etc) and potentially cause a wreck.
We just don’t ever see it happening because it’s really quick and the computer does it. Thats why when the mechanic tells you you need a new electronic control module, sometimes a new car is more cost effective. He’s telling you your car needs a brain transplant
yep, this. that was kind of my point posting the quote I did. Cars have had decades upon decades of refinement and idiot-proofing such that any numpty can get in one and drive it for 150-175,000 miles with almost no fuss (and minimal training.) Also they’ve had decades of emissions, fuel economy, and safety regulations pushing that along. and of course, if yours happens to putter out on the road, you pull off to the side.
planes require quite a bit of training, so with that and the FAA conservatism mentioned by a few people, there’s really no impetus to push it forward. And while I think aircraft do have some emissions limits, they’re nowhere near what cars are constrained by. Heck I think leaded gas is still fairly widely available for airplanes.
I have no experience on airplanes but have good experience on industrial gas turbines (some are modified airplane engines)
Failure levels : Once in a decade failure rate gives a probability of failure of 0.0003 ( Table 7 : Risk Analysis Course Lecture on Probability of Rare Events). Note that it is median probability and the standard deviation maybe higher based on anecdotes above. Most engine manufacturers have 6 sigma standards and try to reduce these numbers to significantly low.
Fatigue and Vibration : Due to high temperatures and high rpms, fatigue and vibration failures are more severe for gas turbines than car engines. They don’t scale linearly. Even if you fully automate a gas turbine startup, it will still take a few minutes (5 to 10) for it to startup. The auxiliary power unit spins up the gas turbines with progressive speed making sure that the air compressor (which has regimes for stall (surge)) is protected. Once you have adequate air flow, only then you’d start injecting fuel, avoiding thermal shock (fatigue) on turbine blades until the engine gets stable.
In general, centrifugal compressors (the kind used in gas turbines ) have to be watched closely during startup because of surge (stall) behavior.
The car battery with 100s of CCAs can spin up the engine to 10s of RPM in seconds. A Auxiliary power unit doesn’t have that kind of oomph and even if it did, the turbine and compressor are not that fast to come online.
The simple answer is that small airplanes are not as technologically advanced as cars, because they don’t make nearly enough of them per year to recoup fixed R&D costs. Cessna sells less than 100 piston airplanes each year. If they decide to invest $5M per year in developing new automation systems (a laughably low amount) they have to raise the price of the planes by $50,000 each!
As you get to larger and more expensive planes, things do get slightly better - but the systems also get more complex, so even though more things are automated, the apparent complexity to the pilot or to an observer watching a YouTube video might still be high.
The plane in your video is a TBM 850, built in the early 2000s. It cost about $4M new and has about 1,800 horsepower. Newer ones have slightly fewer knobs to twiddle, but not by much.
They’ve been manufacturing TBMs since 1988 and have made a grand total of 980. About 30 each year.
If they increase their price by 10%, they can fund about $12M in annual R&D.
Ford sells 2.5M cars each year, let’s imagine for $25,000 each. If they increased their price by 10%, they could fund $6 billion in annual R&D.
That’s why your car is simpler to start than your airplane.
That is largely due to continued use of engines developed between 1930 and 1950 in small single-engine airplanes. The airplanes were certified to run on a short list of engines, and those engines were certified to run on leaded gasoline.
For at least awhile there was a diesel engine available for small airplanes, but getting permission to install one instead to more typical Continental or Lycoming brand (or even Rolls Royce) was time consuming and expensive.
Ultralights and many kitplanes run on different engines (many of which were originally snowmobile or boat, but since evolved a bit), many of which take unleaded premium autogas… except there are issues about taxation and liability around that, too.
It’s historical legacy that results in small planes flying on leaded gasoline, not any need of physics.
Watch this startup procedure for the highly-automated Airbus A320. Most of the runtime of the video consists of verifying that the various systems are working correctly, and programming the flight computer. If you don’t care about safety or getting to the right destination, you can skip all of that. The engine start itself consists of pushing “Autostart”.
I’m just speculating here. But having a single step start-up process probably makes things statistically more likely to break down.
There are a number of necessary steps in starting up a vehicle, regardless of whether it’s a plane or a car (or a submarine or a locomotive or a snowmobile). You can have each step initiated by its own individual control. Or you can set up a system that has one control that initiates a series of separate start-up actions. Obviously that combined single control is going to be more complicated that the set of individual controls as well as being redundant to the individual controls. It’s making the start-up system more complex so it’s added something that can break down to the start-up process.
For the sake of convenience or security, you might accept the slight added complexity to the controls. But if your main concern is keeping the vehicle as safe as theoretically possible, you want to keep all of the controls as simple and direct as possible.
