Aviation Maintenance Technology General II

Course Description

Aviation Maintenance Technology General II completes the General portion of an FAA aviation maintenance curriculum. It covers electrical theory and aircraft electrical systems, aircraft materials and processes, inspection methods, cleaning and corrosion control, weight and balance, and ground operations and servicing, combining classroom instruction with hands-on shop work.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, AMT is the Aviation Maintenance Technology prefix. This course follows AMT1751C and is delivered at approximately three Florida institutions within programs leading toward the FAA Airframe and Powerplant certificate. The C suffix denotes integrated lecture and laboratory.

The content here is more technically demanding than General I. Electrical theory in particular is the subject that separates students in aviation maintenance programs — it is abstract, it is cumulative, and every aircraft system in the Airframe and Powerplant curricula that follows depends on it.

⚠ Two institutions, two completely different packagings of the same FAA curriculum

This is the most instructive numbering divergence in this repository, because the two schemes can be reconciled arithmetically.

The FAA prescribes the content of the General portion of an aviation maintenance technician curriculum. Florida institutions package it differently:

• FSCJ delivers it as two large blocks — AMT1751C "Aviation Maintenance Technology General I" and AMT1752C "General II" — at roughly 6 credits each.
• Broward College delivers the same content as ten micro-courses of one or two credits each: AMT1001C Basic Electricity (2 cr / 89.25 hrs), AMT1011C Aircraft Drawings (1 / 21), AMT1021C Weight and Balance (1 / 32.5), AMT1031C Fluid Lines and Fittings (1 / 26.25), AMT1041C Materials and Processes (2 / 84), AMT1050C Ground Operations and Servicing (1 / 31.5), AMT1061C Cleaning and Corrosion Control (1 / 26.25), AMT1071C Mathematics for Aviation (1 / 21), AMT1080C FARs, Forms, Privileges & Human Factors (1 / 42), and AMT1090C Basic Physics (1 / 26.25).

Broward's ten General courses sum to exactly 12 credits and exactly 400.00 contact hours — and 400 hours is the FAA's long-standing minimum for the General curriculum. That exact sum is strong evidence the two packagings cover identical ground, and it is the basis for the 6 credits / 200 hours reported for each FSCJ block here. Treat the hour figure as derived rather than published and confirm on your own syllabus.

SCNS equivalency does not cross numbers. A student who completed Broward's ten courses has not, formally, completed AMT1751C — and one who completed AMT1751C has not completed Broward's ten. In practice this matters less than it would elsewhere, because what actually transfers in this field is FAA-documented training toward the mechanic certificate, tracked by the certificated school rather than by the registrar. Have both evaluated: the college credit by the receiving institution, and the FAA training by the receiving Part 147 school.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Apply electrical theory: current, voltage, resistance, Ohm's law, and power in direct current circuits.
• Analyze series, parallel, and series-parallel circuits and calculate the values in each.
• Describe alternating current fundamentals, inductance, capacitance, and their behaviour in circuits.
• Describe aircraft electrical system components: batteries, generators, alternators, motors, switches, relays, and protective devices.
• Read and interpret aircraft electrical schematics and wiring diagrams.
• Use test equipment — multimeter, ammeter, ohmmeter — to measure and troubleshoot circuits.
• Fabricate, install, and inspect aircraft electrical wiring, terminals, and connectors.
• Troubleshoot electrical faults systematically rather than by substitution.
• Identify aircraft materials — metals, alloys, composites, plastics, and rubber — and describe their properties and applications.
• Describe heat treatment, hardness testing, and the effect of processing on material properties.
• Apply nondestructive inspection methods: visual, dye penetrant, magnetic particle, eddy current, and ultrasonic.
• Identify types of corrosion, describe the conditions producing each, and apply removal and prevention treatments.
• Clean aircraft and components using appropriate agents and methods.
• Perform aircraft weighing and compute weight and balance, including centre of gravity and loading limits.
• Perform ground operations: starting, taxiing signals, servicing, towing, tie-down, and marshalling.
• Apply ground safety practices around aircraft, including propeller, rotor, and jet blast hazards.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe composite materials, their inspection, and basic repair considerations.
• Describe corrosion-prone areas by aircraft type and operating environment.
• Describe electrical load analysis.
• Describe fuel servicing, quality control, and contamination.
• Describe aircraft jacking and shoring.
• Continue preparation for the FAA General written examination.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• DC electrical theory: Ohm's law, power, and circuit analysis
• Series, parallel, and combination circuits
• AC fundamentals, inductance, and capacitance
• Batteries, generators, alternators, and motors
• Circuit protection, switches, relays, and controls
• Electrical schematics and wiring diagrams
• Test equipment and measurement
• Wiring, terminals, connectors, and installation practice
• Systematic electrical troubleshooting
• Aircraft materials: metals, alloys, composites, and non-metallics
• Heat treatment and material processing
• Nondestructive inspection methods
• Corrosion: types, causes, detection, removal, and prevention
• Cleaning agents and methods
• Weight and balance theory, weighing procedure, and computation
• Ground operations, servicing, towing, and marshalling
• Ramp and ground safety

Optional Topics

• Composite inspection and repair fundamentals
• Corrosion in coastal and marine operating environments
• Electrical load analysis
• Fuel servicing and contamination control
• Jacking, shoring, and aircraft movement
• FAA General written examination preparation

Resources & Tools

• FAA-H-8083-30, the Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook — General — free and authoritative for every topic in this course.
• AC 43.13-1B, Acceptable Methods, Techniques, and Practices — free, and the working reference for wiring, corrosion treatment, and inspection practice.
• Aviation Maintenance Technician Series: General (Dale Crane) — the standard commercial text.
• 14 CFR Parts 43, 65, and 91, free at eCFR.
• FAA Airman Certification Standards for the Aviation Mechanic.
• Shop equipment: multimeters and test sets, wiring and terminal tools, NDI equipment (penetrant, magnetic particle, eddy current), corrosion treatment materials, aircraft scales, and jacks.
• Manufacturer maintenance manuals, wiring diagram manuals, and weight and balance documentation.
• FAA General written examination preparation materials (ASA, Gleim, or Jeppesen).

Career Pathways

• Certificated A&P mechanic — airlines, repair stations, corporate flight departments, and general aviation.
• Airline line maintenance technician and heavy maintenance technician.
• Repair station technician — Florida's Part 145 MRO sector is among the largest in the country.
• Avionics technician — the electrical content here is the foundation for it; pairs with the AMT avionics sequence and NCATT or FCC credentials.
• NDI technician — nondestructive inspection is a well-paid specialization with its own certification levels.
• Corrosion control specialist — genuinely in demand in Florida for the reasons described below.
• Inspection Authorization (IA) — after experience as a certificated mechanic.
• Quality assurance and maintenance management.
• Florida employers include major carrier maintenance bases, a large MRO sector across Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville, corporate aviation, and the Space Coast aerospace corridor. SOC code 49-3011 Aircraft Mechanics and Service Technicians.

Special Information

⚠ The credential is the FAA certificate, not the degree

The most important thing an aviation maintenance student can understand, and it reframes the whole program.

An employer hires a mechanic on the FAA Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) certificate, issued under 14 CFR Part 65. The certificate is earned by completing training at an FAA-certificated Part 147 Aviation Maintenance Technician School (or by documenting practical experience), and then passing, for each rating, a written test, an oral examination, and a practical test. The college credential is secondary; some employers care about the degree, all of them care about the certificate.

Three practical consequences:

• Verify the school holds a current FAA Part 147 certificate before enrolling. Training at a non-certificated provider does not carry the same route to eligibility, and this is not recoverable afterward.
• General is only the first third. The A&P requires General plus Airframe and Powerplant. A student who completes only the General courses holds no rating.
• Plan and budget for the tests. Written, oral, and practical testing is separate from tuition, and the oral and practical are conducted by a Designated Mechanic Examiner at additional cost.

⚠ Part 147 was substantially rewritten and rule 11 applies hard. The FAA replaced the long-standing prescriptive curriculum-and-hours structure with one based on Airman Certification Standards, with a transition period during which schools moved to the new framework. That means the fixed hour totals described in older catalogs and textbooks — including the 400-hour General figure used above — reflect the historic structure, and a school's current curriculum may be organized differently. Verify the current requirements with the FAA and with the specific Part 147 school rather than relying on published hour counts, a prior cohort's experience, or this guide.

⚠ Corrosion is Florida's defining maintenance problem

The corrosion content in this course matters more here than almost anywhere else in the country, and students should understand why.

Florida combines salt air, high humidity, high temperatures, and intense ultraviolet exposure — the four conditions that drive aircraft corrosion — and aircraft based near the coast are in a genuinely aggressive environment. Aircraft operated from Florida coastal fields corrode faster than comparable aircraft inland, and corrosion is a leading reason for structural repair and for aircraft being retired.

What follows practically:

• Know the corrosion-prone areas — battery compartments, bilge and belly areas, wheel wells, exhaust trails, lavatory and galley surrounds, and any location where dissimilar metals meet or moisture collects.
• Distinguish the types — surface, pitting, intergranular, exfoliation, galvanic, filiform, and stress corrosion — because the treatment and the airworthiness significance differ. Intergranular and exfoliation corrosion in particular can compromise structural integrity while looking modest at the surface.
• Removal has limits. Material removed to clean up corrosion counts against allowable limits in the structural repair manual; a mechanic who grinds until it looks clean may have created a bigger problem than the corrosion.
• Prevention is the job — washing, drainage, sealants, corrosion-preventive compounds, and inspection intervals.

Florida employers value corrosion competence specifically, and the state's marine and coastal operations make it a genuine specialization.

⚠ Electrical theory is where students fail, and the failure is predictable

The most demanding content in the General curriculum. Students who are comfortable with mechanical work often find electrical theory disorienting because nothing is visible — current cannot be seen, and the reasoning is entirely by inference from measurement.

The pattern of failure is consistent: students memorize Ohm's law, pass the arithmetic, and cannot then troubleshoot a real circuit, because troubleshooting requires reasoning about where the fault must be given what the meter reads. Three things address it:

• Build and break circuits deliberately. Insert a known fault and find it with a meter. This is the only method that develops troubleshooting reasoning.
• Learn to read schematics as maps of current flow, not as diagrams to be memorized. A mechanic who can trace a circuit on paper can find the fault in the aircraft.
• Troubleshoot systematically, never by substitution. Replacing parts until the problem goes away is expensive, does not identify the cause, and in aviation is a documented source of repeat failures. Measure, narrow, confirm.

The payoff is direct: avionics and electrical work is among the best-compensated specializations in aviation maintenance, and the shortage of technicians who are genuinely comfortable with it is persistent.

⚠ Weight and balance is a computation with flight-safety consequences

An aircraft loaded outside its centre of gravity envelope may be uncontrollable, and weight and balance errors have caused fatal accidents. The mechanic's role is concrete: performing the aircraft weighing, computing the empty weight and centre of gravity, and making the record entries that the operator then uses for every subsequent loading calculation.

Two points students should carry: the arithmetic is simple and the errors are procedural — wrong datum, wrong arm sign, forgetting to account for equipment installed or removed, or failing to update the records after a modification; and the record is what everyone downstream relies on, so an error in the weight and balance record propagates into every flight until someone catches it.

⚠ Ground operations: the ramp is genuinely dangerous

The ground operations content covers hazards that injure and kill people every year in aviation.

• Propellers and rotors — a turning propeller is effectively invisible, and prop strikes are a recurring cause of fatality. Never approach from the front, never assume an engine will not start, and treat every propeller as live.
• Jet intake and exhaust — intake suction can ingest a person, and exhaust blast can throw one. The danger zones are published and are larger than intuition suggests.
• Towing and pushback — nose gear steering limits are real, and exceeding them damages the aircraft; personnel are also crushed in towing accidents.
• Fuelling — bonding and grounding, fire watch, and no ignition sources.
• Hearing protection — the ramp is a high-noise environment and hearing loss is cumulative and permanent, the same principle documented for audio engineers elsewhere in this repository.

Course format, credits, and contact hours

The 6 credits and 200 contact hours reported here are derived as described above from FSCJ's credit value and the reconciliation with Broward's General sequence. These figures reflect the historic Part 147 hour-based structure; schools have transitioned to the competency-based Airman Certification Standards framework, so confirm the current structure and scheduled hours with your own program.

Delivery is integrated lecture and shop with a portion web-facilitated. Assessment combines written examination with practical projects evaluated to FAA standards — work meets the standard or is redone. Completing General I and II positions a student to take the FAA General written examination, which is worth doing while the material is fresh rather than deferring until after the Airframe and Powerplant coursework.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

As with General I, FAA training transfer is the determination that matters when moving between schools, and it is made by the receiving Part 147 school rather than the registrar. Have both the college credit and the FAA training evaluated in writing.