Originally Posted by
Boslandew
I was reading a copy of pilots notes for the DC3 some while ago and it showed that the engines were started with the mixtures in idle/cutoff. Could anyone explain why it is done this way?
I never flew DC3, but this link
dc3throt suggests that there was a priming fuel pump which was operated in bursts of about 1 second. The mixture lever would need to be at cut off to prevent flooding. Once the engine fired, the mixture control could be moved to auto rich and topped up with more prime if necessary.