We need to go back to round engines

Anybody can start a turbine, you just need to move a switch from "OFF" to "START," and then remember to move it back to "ON" after a while. My PC is harder to start.

Cranking a round engine requires skill, finesse and style. On some planes, the pilots are not even allowed to do it.

Turbines start by whining for a while, then give a small lady-like poot then whine louder. Round engines give a satisfying rattle-rattle, click-click BANG, more rattles, another BANG, a big macho fart or two, more clicks, a lot of smoke and finally a serious low pitched roar.

We like that. It's a guy thing.

When you start a round engine, your mind is engaged and you can concentrate on the flight ahead. Starting a turbine is like flicking on a ceiling fan: Useful, but hardly exciting.

Turbines don't break often enough, leading to aircrew boredom, complacency and inattention.

A round engine at speed looks and sounds like it's going to blow at any minute. This helps concentrate the mind.

Turbines don't have enough control levers to keep a pilot's attention. There's nothing to fiddle with during the flight.

Turbines smell like a Boy Scout camp full of Coleman lanterns.

Round engines smell like God intended flying machines to smell.

I think I hear the nurse coming down the hall. I gotta go.

Ex-round engine driver.

Those rotary engines. . . the Le Rhones, the Monos, and the Clergets!

They made a sort of crackling hiss, and always the same smell of castor oil spraying backwards. The 0il in a fine mist over your leather helmet and your coat. They were delightful to fly, the controls so light, the engines so smooth running. Up among the sunlit cumulus under the blue sky I could loop and rolls and spin my Camel with the pressure of two fingers on the stick besides the button which I used as little as possible. Looping, turn off the petrol by the big plug cock upon the panel just before the bottom of the dive, ease the stick gently back and over you go. The engine dies at the top of the loop; ease the stick fully back and turn the petrol on again so that the engine comes to life five or six seconds later.

She would climb at nearly a thousand feet a minute, my new Clerget Camel; she would do a hundred and ten miles an hour. She would be faster, I thought, than anything upon the Western Front... A turn to the left in the bright sun, keeping the hedge in sight through the hole in the top plane. A turn to the right. Now, turn in, a little high, stick over and top rudder, the air squirting in upon you sideways round the windscreen. Straight out, over the hedge, and down onto the grass. Remember that the Clerget lands very fast, at over forty miles an hour, and with that great engine in the nose the tail was light.

Watch it... Lovely.

˜ Nevil Shute, 'The Rainbow and the Rose.