FAA A&P Mechanic (General) Practice Test
Free FAA Aviation Mechanic General written-exam practice in English, Chinese, and Spanish — mechanic privileges and maintenance records, basic electricity, weight and balance, materials and hardware, and ground operation and servicing, with an explanation for every answer.
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Practice questions based on 14 CFR Parts 43 and 65 and the FAA Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook—General (FAA-H-8083-30). This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Federal Aviation Administration. This bank covers the GENERAL written test only; the Airframe and Powerplant written tests and the oral and practical exams are separate. Torque values, servicing quantities, corrosion rework limits, and inspection criteria always come from the manufacturer's current maintenance data and the applicable airworthiness directives — never from a practice test. Confirm current eligibility and testing requirements with the FAA before you test.
About the FAA Aviation Mechanic General written test
The General test is the part of the A&P certificate that everyone takes, whichever rating they are after, and it is the one that catches people out. Candidates arrive from a maintenance background expecting to be asked how to fix things, and instead get asked who is legally allowed to sign for the fix, what has to appear in the logbook entry afterwards, why a nickel-cadmium battery's state of charge cannot be read from a hydrometer, and where the center of gravity ends up after a passenger moves aft. It is a breadth test: regulations and recordkeeping, basic electricity, weight and balance, mathematics and physics, materials and hardware, corrosion, fluid lines, drawings, ground handling and servicing, and human factors. The good news is that almost none of it goes stale. What a mechanic may approve for return to service, what makes a repair major rather than minor, why a fuel truck is bonded to the aircraft before the cap comes off, and why a 37-degree AN flare must never meet a 45-degree fitting are settled by regulation and by physics, not by a service bulletin. This bank is written to that durable layer on purpose. Torque figures, servicing quantities, corrosion rework limits, and inspection criteria are never the keyed answer, because in the hangar those come from the manufacturer's current data and from the applicable airworthiness directives — knowing to go and look them up is the actual competency, and it is what the questions test. Every electrical, weight-and-balance, and mathematics problem is self-contained: the stem gives you every number you need, so you can work it the way you will work it on test day. All questions appear in English, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish with a full explanation for every answer.
How to study for the General written test
Start with the regulations, not because they are the biggest slice but because they change how you read everything else. Read 14 CFR Part 43 and Part 65 Subpart D end to end at least once, in the actual regulatory text rather than in somebody's summary — they are short, and the exam questions are written close to the wording. What you are looking for is the shape of the system: who may perform work, who may approve it for return to service, which acts are reserved to a holder of an inspection authorization, what makes a repair or alteration major, and which of those outcomes produces a logbook entry and which produces a Form 337. Then read the recordkeeping rules asking one question of every scenario — what exactly must be written down, and by whom. Candidates lose points here not because the rules are hard but because they answer from shop habit rather than from the regulation.
Treat electricity and weight and balance as skills to drill rather than chapters to read. Both are scored on whether you can execute a small calculation quickly and without a slip, and both punish the candidate who understands the concept but has not done twenty of them. For electricity, get to the point where series and parallel behaviour is automatic: what happens to total resistance, to the voltage across each element, and to the current in each branch, and what the rest of the circuit does when one element opens or shorts. For weight and balance, build the habit of writing out weight, arm, and moment as three columns before you touch the arithmetic — most wrong answers on this material are bookkeeping errors, not conceptual ones. Learn the shift problem in both directions, because the test asks it both ways: how far the center of gravity moves when a known weight is shifted a known distance, and what weight or distance is needed to move the center of gravity to a target.
For materials, corrosion, fluid lines, and drawings, study the mechanism and the failure it causes, never the number. Ask why rather than how much at every step: why dissimilar metals in contact corrode and which of the pair is attacked, why exfoliation follows the grain direction while pitting does not, why sanding through Alclad destroys the protection it was there to provide, why a magnetic particle inspection is useless on aluminum and where dye penetrant fails, why a flexible hose is installed with slack and never with a twist, and why a 37-degree flare and a 45-degree fitting cannot seal against each other. Learned that way the material is compact and it stays correct, whereas the numeric version of the same content goes stale and was never yours to memorize. Drawings reward the same treatment: learn the line conventions and what a section view is actually showing you, and the questions become readable.
Finish with ground operation, servicing, and human factors, which look like common sense until you sit the questions and find that most of them turn on a specific hazard mechanism. Know why the fuel truck is bonded to the aircraft before the cap is opened and what static charge that prevents, why petroleum products and oxygen systems are a catastrophic combination, why carbon dioxide is the wrong choice in a confined space, what each class of fire needs and what the wrong agent does, and why jacking happens inside a closed hangar. The human-factors material deserves more respect than it usually gets: the error precursors commonly taught as the dirty dozen, the discipline of a written turnover so a partly finished job is never inherited silently, tool control, and the professional duty to stop rather than sign for work you could not do correctly. On the exam it is straightforward marks. In a hangar it is the part of the syllabus that keeps aircraft from falling out of the sky, and the questions are written with that in mind.
FAQ
What does the General test cover, and how does it differ from the Airframe and Powerplant tests?
General is the shared foundation: the regulations that define what a certificated mechanic may do, maintenance records and publications, basic electricity, weight and balance, mathematics and physics, materials and processes, corrosion, fluid lines and fittings, aircraft drawings, ground operation and servicing, and human factors. It carries no aircraft-specific systems work. Airframe covers structures and airframe systems; Powerplant covers reciprocating and turbine engines, propellers, and engine systems. They are separate written tests, and the certificate also requires an oral and practical exam. This bank is the General section only, so anything you find here about rigging, sheet-metal repair procedures, or engine overhaul would be out of scope by design.
Do I need to memorize torque values, servicing quantities, and corrosion limits?
No, and this bank never keys an answer to one. In the hangar those numbers come from the manufacturer's current maintenance data, the applicable airworthiness directives, and the type certificate data sheet — a mechanic who works from memory instead of the book is the problem the regulations exist to prevent. What you do need is the reasoning around them: that a torque wrench used with an extension no longer indicates the torque actually applied and the reading must be recalculated, that lubricating a thread changes the relationship between torque and clamping force, that a fastener may be neither over- nor under-torqued, and that the limit itself is looked up. Where this bank uses a number, the stem supplies it and you apply or compute with it.
How much math is on the test, and can I use a calculator?
A meaningful share of the General test is arithmetic you have to be quick and reliable at rather than clever with: ratio and proportion, percentages, powers and roots, area and volume, algebraic transposition, Ohm's law and the power formulas, and weight-and-balance moment arithmetic. The testing center's rules on what you may bring change, so confirm them with the FAA and with your testing provider rather than assuming — but plan to be fluent without help, because speed on the easy computations is what buys you time on the reasoning questions. Every calculation item in this bank is self-contained, so you can practice the whole loop: pull the numbers out of the stem, set up moment equals weight times arm, and check that your answer is physically sensible before you look at the options.
What is the difference between performing maintenance and approving an aircraft for return to service?
This distinction runs through the whole regulations section and is worth getting straight before anything else. Performing the work and taking legal responsibility for it are two separate acts, they can be done by two different people, and only the second one requires the certificate and rating that matches the work. A person can work under the supervision of a certificated mechanic without holding a certificate, but the supervising mechanic is the one who signs, and a signature approves only the work actually performed — it is not a statement that the whole aircraft is airworthy. Which rating you hold determines what you may approve, some inspections require an inspection authorization rather than a mechanic certificate alone, and the record entry has to identify the work, the date it was completed, and the person approving it by signature and certificate number. Expect scenario questions that hinge on exactly this.
Are these the real FAA test questions?
No. These are original practice questions written to the same subject areas and the same sources the test draws on — 14 CFR Parts 43 and 65 and the FAA Aviation Maintenance Technician Handbook—General — and every answer is checked against those sources and carries an explanation. Nobody should sell you the live question bank, and a bank that promises it is either lying or breaking the rules. Practising against source-grounded questions is also better preparation than drilling remembered ones, because the reasoning transfers when the wording changes. Use this alongside the handbook and the regulations themselves, and confirm current eligibility, experience, and testing requirements with the FAA before you apply.