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, 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 the same forces once something is allowed to move, like a landing gear extending into an airflow that pushes back or a wheel spinning up in the half second after touchdown, and both rows sit at level 2, so the syllabus expects numbers rather than descriptions.

Dynamics splits into two rows: mass, force and energy in the first, where the UK’s wording adds inertia, work, power, heat and efficiency, and momentum in the second, beside impulse, gyroscopic principles and friction. 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, or “specific gravity and density” as the UK has it, 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 is worded identically by both authorities: “viscosity, compressibility, static, dynamic and total pressure”. That single 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 is where the EASA table is most economical: two rows, one for temperature and one for heat. The UK opens the second out into heat capacity, heat transfer, gas laws and engine cycles, and those last two words are where Module 15 begins: 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 paper sets 52 multiple choice questions over 65 minutes, 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 draws no distinction between a question you can settle in a breath and one that needs three lines of working, and Module 2 holds a great many of the second kind.

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.

Two level columns and eleven rows, and the columns run in step all the way down except for the first: the UK text sets 2.1, Matter, at level 1 where EASA sets it at level 2. The titles differ more often than the levels do, and always in the same direction, with the EASA row naming the subject and the UK row listing what’s inside it, so where a row looks thin in the EASA column, it’s often written out at length in the UK one, and the marked rows below are where that happens.

At topic 2.1, and nowhere else. Everything else you could compare here comes back the same: 52 questions and 65 minutes with no essay, Module 2 without a letter after it on either side, and a single sequence of eleven topics running down both tables. So the whole of what separates a UK sitting from an EASA one in this module fits inside a single row, Matter, where the depth the two authorities ask for parts company; the paper built around it is one of the nine papers the two set alike, and a difference this narrow is rare anywhere in the B1.1 set.

The UK text 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, which 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 candidate has one row in this module where a description will do. An EASA candidate has none.

The rest of the differences live in the titles, and each one reads as a list of what its row holds. The UK’s 2.2.3(a) lists “mass, force, inertia, work, power, energy, heat, efficiency” where EASA gives “mass, force and energy”. Its 2.2.3(b) names “momentum, impulse, gyroscopic principles, friction” where EASA has “momentum and conservation of momentum”. Its 2.3(a) is “temperature, thermometers and scales” and its 2.3(b) “heat capacity, heat transfer, gas laws, engine cycles”, where the EASA rows say only “temperature” and “heat”. Even 2.2.4(a) gains a word, with EASA’s “gravity and density” becoming “specific gravity and density”.

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.

Both authorities require the same thirteen subjects. Only the numbering and some of the titles differ, and the UK still uses the A suffix on four of them where EASA has dropped it. Each has a page of its own.