[Koshkin]

Starting the engine(s) even in a propeller-driven airplane used to be a big deal, too. Hell, I'm sure that even starting a car engine back in the day was a much more complex affair (than simply pushing a button like it is today).

[lsllc]

They used to use what were basically shotgun shells with no pellets to start airplane engines -- it was called a Coffman engine starter (it was actually used as a plot device in the movie Flight of the Phoenix).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffman_engine_starter

[AshleyGrant]

Even today it can be a bear to start the engine of a small piston-powered aircraft. The vast majority of engines used in these aircraft haven't changed very much in the last 70 years.

I've personally dealt with the engine in a Cirrus SR-22 just refusing to start. It was at operating temp on a hot day. We flew in to an airport with the plan being to stop just long enough to fill the fuel tanks and drain our own tanks. The engine was off for about 15 minutes when we went to restart.

We experienced vapor lock, ended up flooding the cylinders with fuel, and at that point we just had to wait. After about 10 minutes we were able to get the engine started. There are no electronics controlling this engine, everything is controlled by the pilot.

FADEC (Full-Authority Digital Engine Control) has slowly started making its way into the small piston market over the last decade, but even with that, it's still controlling engines that are fundamentally the same designs flying in the 50s.

[MS90]

Yes, early cars had to be started with a crank handle that stuck out of the front of the grill, similar to how early propeller engines had to be hand-spun to get going. Apparently if you didn't crank it quite hard enough the handle could snap back at you rather violently, one of my great-grandmothers had her arm broken this way.

[h2odragon]

> the handle could snap back at you rather violently

If it backfired. I got thrown over a Studebaker that way when I was like 8; I wasn't big enough to turn the handle by hand so I was jumping on it. It usually worked tho.

[WalterBright]

With the piston engines they had to be turned over by hand first to let the oil drain out of the cylinders before starting them by pulling on the propeller.

[bryanlarsen]

Check out a video on how to start a model T. It was a two man job: one on the inside fiddling with spark timing, the other on the outside cranking it over. Often you also need a bit of priming (aka choke).

[jackmott42]

Those things really are fundamentally easier, which is why it became routine and something every day people could operate day in day out pretty quickly. Rocket engines are still very hard to do 70 years later.

[bryanlarsen]

Starting a modern car engine is not easy. They've got high compression ratios and are other wise tuned for high performance and fuel economy making a sustained ignition difficult. It's the computers and other timing components that make it seem easy and everyday.