EASA Part-66 Module 2: Physics

The module opens on the smallest of its five subjects and hands what follows to the largest. Matter is the physics of what things are made of and why that decides how they behave: why a solid holds its shape while a gas fills whatever contains it, and what has changed inside a component that went past the temperature it was built for. One row is all it gets, worth 5 questions, and it’s the ground Module 6 stands on when it turns to aircraft materials.

Mechanics is the largest, and it begins with statics, force in balance: the aeroplane sitting on jacks, the moment a loaded control surface puts through its hinge, and the tension in a cable whose pulley bracket carries the reaction. Kinetics is motion itself, uniform, accelerating, circular and vibrating, like a landing gear extending into an airflow that pushes back or a wheel spinning up in the half second after touchdown. Both rows sit at level 2, so the syllabus expects numbers rather than descriptions, and EASA gives them 7 and 7 questions, the most of any rows in the branch.

Dynamics splits into two rows. The first is mass, force and energy, which EASA’s guidance opens out into inertia, work, power, energy, heat and efficiency; the second is momentum, beside impulse, gyroscopic principles and friction, and EASA gives the pair 5 and 4 questions. Gyroscopic behaviour earns its place: a spinning mass resists any attempt to tilt the plane it turns in, and that explains both the attitude instrument on the flight deck and the load a manoeuvring aeroplane puts through a rotating shaft’s bearings. Friction is there for a harder reason: a torque figure is only a bolt tension if the threads are in the condition the manual assumed, dry where it says dry and lubricated where it says lubricated.

Fluid dynamics has two rows to itself. The first is gravity and density in the regulation’s table, specific gravity and density in EASA’s guidance, and it is why fuel is measured by volume and carried by mass, and why a hydrometer float tells you the state of an electrolyte. The second covers viscosity, compressibility, and static, dynamic and total pressure, with Bernoulli’s theorem and the venturi behind them. That line is the whole theory of the pitot static system, and the reason a blocked static line makes several instruments wrong at once rather than stopping one, in ways you can predict once you know which pressure is trapped.

Thermodynamics looks like the most economical corner of the EASA table, one row for temperature and one for heat, until you read EASA’s guidance under the second: heat capacity, heat transfer, expansion, the first and second laws, the gas laws, engine cycles, refrigerators and heat pumps, and latent heat. Those engine cycles are where Module 15 begins, since a jet engine is a thermodynamic argument about air drawn in, compressed, burnt and expanded through a turbine long before it’s a piece of hardware. Optics and wave motion close the module with a row each: reflection and refraction are the fibre optic data bus and the borescope you inspect a combustion chamber through, and wave motion is what lets an ultrasonic probe find a crack under paint.

The EASA paper is 52 multiple choice questions over 65 minutes, three answers to each and no essay, and here the time buys working time rather than reading time. A question of two lines can still want a formula rearranged, a quantity converted into the units that formula expects, and a sum carried out before it gives up an answer, so the pace that feels unhurried in a descriptive paper is not the pace this one runs at. The clock allows the same 75 seconds for every question, and on a paper set wholly at level 2, where using formulae with the physical laws is part of the requirement, some of those seconds go on working rather than reading.

EASA’s guidance, its AMC to Part-66, spreads the 52 unevenly: more than half on the six mechanics rows, 8 on heat on its own, and only 5 and 4 on light and sound. EASA calls those figures acceptable numbers, not a fixed make-up, so treat them as the shape of the paper and nothing firmer.

At the 75% pass mark you need 39 correct answers, which leaves 13 to lose across the whole of matter, mechanics, heat, light and sound, and the way the wrong answers are written makes that allowance hard to feel while you’re spending it. Appendix II requires that in numerical questions the incorrect alternatives correspond to procedural errors, meaning a correction applied in the wrong sense or a conversion done the wrong way round, rather than random numbers. So a pressure taken in bar into an equation that wanted pascals lands you on a figure already printed on the page, and choosing it feels like arriving somewhere, which is exactly what the rule is for.

The EASA table runs to eleven rows, all at level 2 for category B1, each carrying the number of questions EASA’s guidance gives it. The UK CAA column matches them all the way down except at the top, where Matter sits at level 1, and the UK table is the wordier of the two, because it kept the old descriptions inside each row where EASA moved them into its guidance.

At topic 2.1, and nowhere else that changes the depth. The UK CAA’s Module 2 is the same paper, 52 questions and 65 minutes and no essay element, over a table that runs code for code with EASA’s, and the two level columns differ in that one cell.

The UK CAA sets Matter at level 1, which asks for familiarity with the basic elements of the subject and a simple description of it in everyday words. EASA raised it to level 2 when it rewrote Part-66, and level 2 asks you to understand the theory, use mathematical formulae alongside the physical laws, and apply what you know through detailed procedures. In practice, a UK CAA candidate has one row in this module where a description will do. An EASA candidate has none.

The rest of the differences are in the wording, because the UK table still prints the old descriptions inside each row. Its 2.2.3(a) runs through mass, force, inertia, work, power, energy, heat and efficiency where the EASA table gives “mass, force and energy”, and its 2.2.3(b) takes in momentum, impulse, gyroscopic principles and friction where EASA has “momentum and conservation of momentum”. Its 2.3(a) and 2.3(b) spell out thermometers and temperature scales, heat capacity, heat transfer, the gas laws and engine cycles where the EASA rows say only “temperature” and “heat”, and its 2.2.4(a) reads “Specific gravity and density”. EASA’s guidance lists the same material under its shorter headings, so a UK CAA candidate loses nothing by revising from this page.

The wider split between the two authorities is on the EASA versus UK CAA page: mutual recognition, which licence to go for, and what happened to the conversion route.

This page covers one of the 13 papers. The rest of the guide covers the route they sit inside: what the exam is, what else you must have done besides passing it, and how the two authorities differ.

EASA requires thirteen modules for category B1.1, and the UK CAA examines the same thirteen subjects. The UK CAA syllabus differs in nine of them, and the UK still adds an A to four module numbers where EASA dropped it, so its number follows the EASA one here, as in 7/7A. Each module has a page of its own, with the EASA paper first and the UK CAA differences marked.