Neat little post on the differences between varying grades of aviation fuel, along with their lead concentrations. The author claims 100LL lead concentration is about 2 grams of lead per gallon. Leaving aside the teeth-itching use of mixing SI and English units, that comes out to around ~0.5 grams per liter.
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The wiki for tetraethyllead, mentions the modern UK limit on lead for vintage vehicles is up to 0.15 grams per liter.
Diamond Aircraft Industries still makes diesel powered aircraft. The diesel engines used to be Thielert, and are now made by Austro Engine, which is a subsidiary of Diamond. The diesel allows for great fuel economy. The DA42 that crossed the Atlantic without refueling, had a fuel burn of 10.9 liters/hour per engine.
EDIT: Thanks @DPRK for the Steinbeck quote. Things have really changed a lot, haven’t they? I thought monkeying with a choke on the old pickup truck was bad…
I’ve been lucky enough to fly quite a bit in a Bell 205 helicopter (skiing). I’ve been told by several of the pilots that if you don’t do the starting procedure EXACTLY right you blow up the turbine. That’s finicky and kind of crazy. The owner of the ski company is a licensed helicopter pilot and he can fly the machine but said he would never attempt to start it!
Years ago, I used to start up the nuclear reactor on a submarine (along with an engineering watch section of 8-10 highly trained nuclear submariners). If we were planning for a departure at 0800, the watch section for the reactor startup was usually told to report to work at 0200. The startup sequence was more than a little involved.
(Another reason the reactor startup took so long is that it is much safer to start up a nuclear reactor slowly than quickly, especially if it has been shut down for a while.)
Back when I was in the U.S. Navy, the guiding philosophy in the nuclear submarine force was to eschew automation to a large extent. This included both the startup and operation of the various pieces of machinery and equipment.
A good example of the philosophy of eschewing automation is the fact that watchstanders were required to periodically take logs by hand. This might involve recording several dozen instrument readings on paper forms. There would be no reason why this couldn’t be automated, but the thought was that by forcing the watchstanders to physically record the logs, it also forced them to keep a close eye on their instruments and pick up on trends.
Running a piece of equipment as complex as a submarine with as little automation as possible was very manpower-intensive. However, the thought was that all this excess manpower was then available for damage control and maintenance (including corrective as well as preventive maintenance).
Consider that going through the full checklist (more than “starting the engine”) is the hallmark of a well-trained pilot who might also be flying different aircraft at different times. So the pilot might see someone who relied on an automated system as being reckless. Then the mindset becomes: professionalism = doing the checklist manually.
I think it was in the Tom Clancy novel “Without Remorse” where one of the characters asks a surgeon, “Do you ever do something the same way every time, even when it doesn’t matter.”
Also, compare the really early days of electronic computers. The experts working on them were comfortable writing their programs in binary! Once you reach a certain level of expertise, certain actions are no longer looked on as impediments.
I acknowledge that aircraft engine starts are more complicated than starting a car, but that was a pretty simple start sequence to be honest. One of the button presses was just cancelling a warning light. If you consider that a key start in a car actually does three things in distinct stages (steering unlock, power on, starter engage), you might recognise that a car start isn’t all that different, it just has those three things on a single rotary switch so it seems like a single action. If you add in the other things you do without thinking about it like, Park brake ON, Doors CLOSED, Clutch DEPRESSED (for standard trans), etc, you can make a car start look complicated if you want to.
A turbine engine (jet or turboprop) needs three things to start, rotation, fuel, ignition. They also have a number of failure modes during the start. They can fail to rotate fast enough, fail to introduce the correct fuel, and fail to ignite the fuel correctly. There are also some others such as a lack of oil pressure or the starter remaining engaged. Turbine engines are simple but they are also built and operated to relatively fine tolerances. A start failure can destroy an engine and they are very expensive to replace or repair which means an automatic start system needs to be able to monitor those things and respond appropriately if the start fails. It also needs to be at least as reliable as a manual start. That said, automatic starts are common modern turbine engines.
As you saw in the A320 video from @Terminus_Est, there are actually only two switch selections needed to start one engine and three to start two engines (the first switch selection is common to both starts). That compares with a single switch action for a car, not all that different really. If you want to start an A320 manually then there is one extra button push at the beginning, then you push the same button again at the end.
One of the reasons why most things aren’t as automated in an aeroplane as in a car is you need to be able to shut systems down independently to avoid cascading failures or for operational reasons. Fuel pumps should be off while refuelling an A320 because certain failures can lead to a fuel spill, but you don’t want to have the whole aircraft shut down, you need the passengers to be able to board and lots of people are working around the aircraft at the same time relying on their little bit of the plane being powered up. So fuel pumps are individually switched off after engine shut down and then on again as part of the flight preparation.
Note also that early computers had elaborate start-up and shut-down procedures too. They typically had a power supply, and some had mechanical machinery (for example, some had the main memory on a magnetically coated rotating drum), and various peripheral devices, all had to be powered up or down separately and generally in some specific sequence.
I had a car where the engine just kind of fell out the bottom, breaking the steering stuff as it went, so I lost power and AND steering at the same time. Luckily I wasn’t going too fast and the car just kind of gently drifted off the road but it could have been a lot worse. Granted I would hope most planes would be in better shape than my POS car.
must have been an older one, AFAIK most if not all modern turbine engines use some form of computer engine control and handle the startup sequence automatically.
But, similar to your experience, I recall reading about older mechanically controlled turbines. it went something like:
Power on
engage starter until engine reaches (X) RPM
enable igniter
enable fuel flow
when fuel ignites keep starter engaged until the engine reaches (Y) RPM
6a) when engine reaches self-sustaining RPM, release starter and igniter.
6b) if engine fails to ignite, do not attempt to restart.
IIRC a failed start would load up the combustor and turbine section with raw fuel and if you tried starting it in that state it could damage stuff.
When Chrysler did the Turbine Car project, they devised a controller that would do all of that automatically, the driver merely had to turn the key and release. it even had a timer which would trip if an attempted restart was tried after a failed one.
Happened to me.
Unbeknownst to me, one of my battery cables was on its last legs.
Earlier that morning, when the car wouldn’t turn over, I was able to jump the battery which got the car moving (my guess is that it probably pushed the cable into the exact right position for it to work properly), but later that evening, the car just turned off and went completely dark while I was going down a hill with a sharp turn. Luckily, I was able to pull off to the side and stop the car.
Similar story:
I had a loose battery cable that prevented me from starting. I thought it was just a dead battery, so I got the car jumped, after which it ran fine. Cruising down the interstate after dark, my distributor rotor suddenly disintegrated. Now the transmission is driving the engine, so I shift to neutral, and of course the engine spins to a stop. So now there’s no output from the alternator. And since the battery connection is loose, that means the headlights immediately wink out. Rural area, so no streetlights - it is DARK, I can’t see a thing. Lucky i managed to pull onto the shoulder and get stopped without anything hanging over in the driving lane, and without smashing a mile marker.
So yeah, if you’re going up in your small piston-engine plane - check BOTH of those magnetos before you leap into the air.
More recently, I had a motorcycle that quit on me while cruising down the interstate. Turned out it was a fuel pump controller that was poorly designed and prone to corrosion (it was only one year old at the time). A recall was announced shortly after that happened.
Even more recently, I had a brake caliper freeze, causing excess drag. Sounded funny on the highway, so I pulled over and checked; right-rear pads and rotor were smoking hot.
Whack-a-Mole, you’ve had pretty good luck in your 30 years. Some private pilots will likewise have good luck for thirty years, despite maybe cutting safety corners. It lasts until they don’t have good luck. I used to know a pilot who was extremely rigorous about following all safety procedures. Example, the passenger door had a sign on it that said “only the pilot is allowed to open/close this door” - and he would reliably become insistent and assertive about it whenever a novice passenger tried to operate the door himself. His philosophy was that safety procedures should be followed with the same sort of adherence and attention to detail as religious rites. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll come home at the end of the day, but it surely boosts the odds.
I had a car (2007) that was in an accident, insurance covered body work and the damage they could find, then a few weeks later part of the transmission seized up with no prior signs of trouble and completely ceased to work (engine would rev, but it wasn’t connected to the wheels anymore) while I was driving to visit people for the holidays. I had an older truck (1998) where the engine hot for a minute, stopped running hot before I could pull over from traffic, then five minutes of driving later overheated and completely shut down. In the first case, mechanics with a financial incentive to find problems (insurance was covering the damage) had checked the car for issues and said it was fine, and the transmission gave no warnings. In the second case, the only warning was the engine running hot for a very short time (which seemed like a fan failed to cut on, then did) only on the same trip where it died.
I’ve heard of a number of people who have had similar experiences - while it’s not common in the sense ‘this is likely to happen to you on a particular drive’, my experience is definitely that it’s common enough that it’s not unreasonable to expect it to happen a few times in your life.
In there we hear from light plane pilots, airline types like me, and a wide variety of perspectives. I also give the ultra-abbreviated version of how much of the airliner-scale pre-start process can be skipped and still actually get the fires lit and the airplane airborne.
Directly back at this thread's OP: The vid you chose shows a machine about as complicated as a locomotive or a 60' yacht.
For a simple Cessna-like product with just one ICE that’s more comparable to a car, there a 3 steps to start the plane: electricity on, mixture knob/lever forward, turn key. Vroom!
Contrast that with a manual transmission car: ensure transmission in neutral, depress brake and/or clutch, turn key. Vroom!
An auto tran is simpler: depress brake, turn key. Vroom!
True enough. Though you can prime an aircraft ICE w a couple cycles of the throttle as well. And in cold weather an older car requires setting the automatic choke by pumping the gas pedal once. And they often required just a little pedal pressure to light reliably.
My overarching point is, as somebody else said way up thread, there are a lot of aircraft preflight steps that aren’t really about engine start. And there are several steps to starting a car engine that folks forget they even do.
There IS a difference. But it’s not as huge as the OP’s first impression.
But on an ICE helo that tail rotor makes its first half circle pretty quickly with plenty of leverage behind it. I wouldn’t want to get whacked with it.
Ref @Johnny_L.A & strobes, in jets we use the fuselage-mounted red rotating beacon / strobes / flashing LEDs as the “engines running or about to start” signal to everyone nearby.
The startup sequence was more than a little involved.