Swinging the Right Way
An aircraft piston engine needs fuel, air and a spark to operate. Simplistically, fuel is provided by gravity or a fuel pump driven by the turning engine, air sucked in by the combustion process through the carburettor, and spark by the magnetos which are also driven by the turning engine. The magnetos are a different sort of spark supplier than in a car engine, which uses the battery to generate a spark through a coil or an electronic ignition system.
Most modern aircraft are fitted with starter motors to turn the engine, but occasionally the system doesn’t work. Unlike cars, there is a back up: the propeller. Manually swinging a propeller can get the engine going, but there are dangers in having body parts so close the prop once the engine starts.
The trick is to know how to do it properly.
The magneto
The most important element in starting an engine is the magneto. Understanding the magneto is fundamental to understanding how to safely hand-swing a propeller, or “throw the prop”.
A magneto is a device which converts rotation to electricity. A copper coil is rotated between the poles of a magnet (or vice versa), and this causes an electric current. The magnetos in aircraft engines are ignition magnetos; they work on the same principle, except the electrical current is converted to a spark.
The magnetos have to spin quite quickly to deliver a spark, and a starter motor doesn’t rotate the engine fast
