Starting Aircraft With a Shotgun Shell?

An overview of the Coffman Engine Starter System.

Movies Featured:

Flight of the Phoenix 1965
Flight of the Phoenix 2004
Battle of Britain 1969

#history #aircraft #airforce

[JohnnyJohnsonEsq]

Hopefully, this turned out okay. I am more comfortable explaining history than mechanics but I like challenging myself and making videos where I get to learn too.

[paleoph]

Fun fact: In the Montana dig site scene from Jurassic Park, a special shotgun shell is also used in a similar way in a device called a Betsy Gun.

[andrewsteele]

Thanks, I was an air cadet when we still had the Canberra bomber in service. And on a field trip to the local Airforce base, we stood beside or near the bomber and they did the shotgun start for demonstration purposes. Really loud & a bit scary when you are a thin 15-year-old.Cheers

[winnon]

Back in the 1970’s I worked for an oil field company. If we were low on air pressure we had cartridge starters. They were larger than a shotgun shell but bigger than a 10 or 12 gauge. They’d work in a bind !

[warpartyattheoutpost]

"Shotgunning" was a similar way of quickly injecting "fuel" during my misspent youth.

[samking]

I have a starter shell in my collection from a Canberra Bomber. It's so cool to see the Canberra start, three shells go off at once and there are three plumes of smoke and the engine just screams away. Really cool

[daniels]

I love that your videos are so concise. You give us just the pertinent info without any filler. Almost all other channels pile on a bunch of useless crap just to make the videos a certain length. Thank you.

[kmorris]

It's hard to gauge what a blast a starter like that would be.

[wallythewondercorncake]

I once saw a Martini Henry with a curved barrel that would be loaded with blanks and used to ignite boilers on ships

[imagifyer]

Coffman style cordite shells were also used as a propellant source in the WW2 Australian 'Murray' Flame tank prototype, which was intended to replace the Matilda Frog flame tank, but never entered service due to the conclusion of the war. The intention was for the cordite shells to be loaded into a breach mechanism, with the expanding gasses actuating a piston which would generate the pressure to expel a charge of flame fuel from the piston chamber.

[brianedwards]

I only clicked on this because of Flight of the Phoenix (the '65 version). I remember it was on TV when I was a kid (I was born in '65) and I thought it looked like it was going to be a snore but by the end I was cheering when the engine turned over too. Still one of my favourite films.

[mufinsp]

The 1965 Flight of the Phoenix is a good classic. A hundred times better than the 2004 remake

[stoneylonesome]

Albanian here. Here, many of our famous million Mile Mercedes W123 300D Turbo’s have been rigged up with shotgun shell starter mechanisms from tractors, so they can be fully run without batteries/electricity, as they use mechanical fuel injection and have compression ignition.

[namvet_e]

A cartridge starting system is used to start engines on B52 bombers so they can get airborne quickly. This is very important if a nuclear attack is detected since anything on the ground will not be useful after the first exchange. A rapid starting system is much more economical than keeping a large number of bombers in the air at all time, which was the practice at the height of the cold war.

[CookieChacho]

Cheers Johnny - as always, it was a blast 😊

[garfieldsmith]

Thanks for the history lesson Johnny. I never knew of this starting method. Always thought crank or electric dolly was used in WW2.

[Dannysoutherner]

Very fascinating! Now I know how these cartridge starters work. It is a simpler system than I thought. Thanks for making this. I always wondered about them.

[SoloPilot]

During the 1920s and 1930s, some aircraft had both electric and Coffman starters. Batteries were heavy and inefficient, and were often shifted from one mounting point to another as an adjustment for weight and balance. This meant that sometimes they were several feet further away from the starter motor, so an aged, hot or cold battery might not have enough energy to fully and reliably spin up the weight that turned the Bendix. The Coffman shell cost a few cents for each try, but would get the engine going, even after the battery had been tried and found lacking. The Napier Lion (water-cooled W-inline 12-cyl) was one that offered a dual-starter accessory pack, but only on engines sold to North America -- engines put on British planes and boats were electric-only, so the used of a "trolley-acc" battery cart was necessary, just as on the Hurricane and Spitfire (whose batteries were not strong enough to crank the engine).

[happyhowey]

Modern F22s have cartridge starters too, heard one going at an airshow. Didn't recognize it at first, but the regular bang, and whine of the engine, and another bang as the pilot gave it another go a few minutes later, gave it away. The local airport I was at for the show didn't have the right equipment or couldn't get access to the normal start cart, was during COVID if memory serves - lots of logistics struggles at that time.

[collyoung]

Many moons ago as a kid I used to start my dads tractor with a Coffman black power shell [hit it with a hammer] - great fun...