How to Become an AME in Canada

Becoming a licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer in Canada means satisfying three separate requirements at once, not completing them as a simple checklist in sequence: basic training (or documented equivalent knowledge), hands-on maintenance experience in the specific rating you're pursuing, and Transport Canada's examinations for that rating. In practice, training and experience are usually built up together over several years, with the examinations attempted once you're eligible.

Which rating you're working toward (M1, M2, E, or S) matters from the start, because the specific training content, experience requirements, and exams all differ by rating — see our guides to each rating for the specifics once you know which one applies to you.

Most people complete basic training through a Transport Canada Approved Training Organization (ATO) — typically a vocational college program specifically recognized under the Canadian Aviation Regulations. Completing an ATO program gives you both knowledge and experience credit toward the requirements below, rather than needing to build 100% of your experience purely on the job.

It's also possible to demonstrate the required technical knowledge by passing Transport Canada's own technical examinations directly, without going through an ATO program — see our AME Technical Exams guide for how that path works.

Alongside (or after) training, you need to accumulate a specific amount of documented, certified maintenance experience — measured in months, split between total experience, experience specific to your rating, and experience on civil-registered aircraft. This experience has to be logged in enough detail to be verified, typically in a personal logbook, and a defined percentage of specific maintenance tasks has to be certified as actually performed by an AME or equivalent.

This is the part of the process people most often underestimate the documentation burden of — see our guides to AME Experience Requirements and the AME Logbook for what actually needs to be recorded and why.

Once you're eligible, you write Transport Canada's examinations for your rating. These break into two genuinely separate exams with separate application forms: a technical examination (testing the systems/technical knowledge for your specific rating) and a regulatory examination (testing the CARs regulatory framework). Both require a 70% passing grade. See our Regulatory Exam and Technical Exams guides for exactly how each is structured.

There isn't one single required order for training and experience — some people complete an ATO program largely before starting paid maintenance work, while others work as an apprentice at an approved maintenance organization from early on, building experience and completing structured training in parallel. Both are legitimate, commonly used routes to the same licence; see our AME Apprenticeship in Canada guide for how the apprentice-style path specifically works.