Experience and eligibility for an FAA A&P

§ 65.77(b) asks for documentary evidence, satisfactory to the Administrator, of either at least 18 months of practical experience with the procedures, practices, materials, tools, machine tools and equipment generally used in constructing, maintaining or altering airframes or powerplants, appropriate to the rating sought, or at least 30 months of practical experience concurrently performing the duties appropriate to both ratings.

Read the second one carefully. It is not 18 plus 18. Two separate stints on airframes and then on powerplants are not 30 months of concurrent work, which is what the rule asks for. And it is 30, not 36. The 36 is a figure that gets passed around, and it is wrong.

A month is judged against roughly 160 hours, an average 40 hour week. But that is a test of whether a month counts, never a total you can pile up early. The FAA has answered an applicant offering the hours in half the calendar time, and the answer was no. That figure, and every other load-bearing number on the route, sits beside the rule that sets it on the FAA A&P facts and figures page.

There is no set logbook and no FAA form for the experience itself. What matters is that an inspector can look at what you bring and see that you did the work. The FAA names these:

A good way to organize it: the FAA suggests listing your experience against at least 50% of the subject areas in the Airman Certification Standards for the rating you want. That gives an inspector something to check against instead of a pile to read.

⚠ The FAA’s own page is stale on this point. It still tells readers to use “part 147 appendices B, C and D” for the subject list. Those appendices were deleted outright when Part 147 was rewritten, effective 21 September 2022. Use the ACS subject areas instead.

What is not accepted: time spent in training, civilian or military. The FAA says so in as many words, and the reason is not red tape. The point of the months is that you have made real mistakes on real aircraft and fixed them, which a classroom cannot give you.

There are two paths, and which one you are on decides whether you visit a FSDO.

With a JSAMTCC certificate of eligibility. If you completed Joint Service Aviation Maintenance Technician Certification Council training and hold a certificate of eligibility, the FAA considers you to have met § 65.77 for the rating listed on it. You are authorized to test with no further FAA endorsement.

Without one. An acceptable military occupational specialty gets you a FSDO appointment, not a pass. You bring a DD Form 214 showing the specialty and length of service in it, plus a letter from an executive officer, maintenance officer, classification officer or a supervisor holding an A&P, certifying your length of service, the time worked in each maintenance occupation, the makes and models involved and where the work was done.

One caution, because you will hear otherwise: the FAA does not name a Joint Services Transcript on its own as a document that authorizes testing. The documents it names are the certificate of eligibility, the DD Form 214 and the officer’s letter. And the same rule applies here as everywhere else: time in technical school does not count toward the months.

This is the step that catches applicants on the experience route, because pilots do all of this online and mechanics do not. Before any test center will book you, you need two things. The first is an FAA Tracking Number from IACRA. For mechanics that is the only thing IACRA is used for, since it does not accept mechanic certificate applications at all. The second is authorization to test, in one of exactly three forms:

FAA Form 8610-2 is still paper and still current, edition 04/26. Fill out two originals, and keep both. The test center scans them and hands them back, and you show them again to the examiner at the oral and practical. Section V is the FAA endorsement. An inspector signs it, not you.

A Part 147 graduate never makes this trip. Their school’s authenticated document under § 147.21 is the authorization. That is one of the real differences between the two routes, and it is weighed on the next page.

One more rule about order, from § 65.75(b): you must pass every written section before you apply for the oral and practical. The only exception is § 65.80, for a school student whose progress an FAA inspector has accepted. And every test, written and practical, has to land inside the same 24 month window.

This page covers one part of the route to your FAA A&P. The other pages cover the rest.

The reference pages under the guide each answer one question, for when what you want is the number rather than the explanation.

Every fact on this page was read from these on 19 August 2026. They are the authority and we are the summary. If we and one of them disagree, they are right.