"Ron Natalie" wrote

Gosh, and you want to wait until the engine quits on takeoff to determine
you need to turn it on and wait for a restart while heading for the trees?

Well yes actually. For one I don't think the engine would quit since
you still have considerable fuel flow due to gravity feed. I have no
way to test that, but even if the engine quit, the prop would not stop.
(I've tried to stop the prop before after pulling the mixture. It takes
quite some time and one has to be flying very slowly.) So once turning
the fuel pump switch on, the engine would run almost immediately (at
least it would if I haven't burnt out the electric pump from over use

Another thing I might add, is that failure of the engine driven pump
is very rare. The chance that it would fail during the 20 seconds or so
of vulnerability (where the time it takes you to think of turning on
the switch really matters) seems to fall into the statistically
insignificant
range.

I think the engineer who thought to include the electric fuel
pump was thinking rationally. I think the person who wrote in
the POH that you should turn it on prophylactically was not.

~Paul