How to Start an Airplane's Engine

How to Start an Airplane's Engine
Hi, I?m Dave Pressey with Saint Charles Flying Service on behalf of Expert Village. Now we're going to talk about starting the engine prior to the flight. Like with any other phase of flying we want to use our checklist. So we're going to start with our starting engine checklist. So our pre-flight checklist is complete, we're finished with that. We're going to check and make sure our seatbelts are on and tight. We want to make sure our fuel selector valve is on full. We have two tanks of fuel, we can turn them on, on either side or off. You want to make sure that that is up and on, so that is on both tanks. Want to make sure that our avionics power and our electrical system is all off. We don't want to start the engine with any electrical power on, so that we don't overload any of our radios. So just going to make sure that our avionics power switch is off, and that all electrical except for this beacon is on. We leave this beacon on to indicate to anyone on the ramp that we're starting our engine. Alright, we're going to test our brakes. The brakes are on the rudder pedals down by your feet. And their brake pedals are actuated by pushing your toes. So pushing forward with your toes will actuate your brakes. There's a brake on each wheel. We also want to check our circuit breakers, just to make sure that nothing has popped open so that all our electrical equipment is functioning properly. Alright, now we'll start the engine. We're going to make sure our mixture is rich. This controls the amount of fuel going to the engine. So we're going to make sure that's full forward or rich so we have the most fuel going to the engine. Next thing, we're going to make sure that our carburetor heat is cold. So this plunger should be in, for our carburetor heat. Master switch will come on, that's this red switch over on this side. So this puts electrical to the aircraft. Next thing we're going to do is prime. We're going to take this plunger, pull it out. And what we're doing is atomizing fuel directly into the engine cylinders, into two of the cylinders. This will aide in getting the engine started. Close that, and lock it. Give it a tug to make sure that it is locked. Now we're going to put the ignition key into the ignition. We're going to hold the brakes, and keep our eyes outside. We're going to clear the propeller area to make sure no one's standing near the engine. We call a clear prop. Hand on the throttle, feet on the brakes. And we'll go ahead and turn the key to start the engine. Okay, of course it's not going to start on the first time.