Because of the existence of composite faults, which consist of both short-out and eccentricity faults, the characteristics of the output voltage and internal magnetic field of aviation generators are less different than those of single short-out faults; this causes the eccentricity fault to be difficult to identify. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method using an enhanced fireworks algorithm (EnFWA) to optimize a deep belief network (DBN). The aviation generator model is built according to the finite element method (FEM), whereas the output of different combinations of composite faults are obtained using simulations. The EnFWA algorithm is used to train and optimize the DBN network to obtain the best structure. Meanwhile, an extreme learning machine (ELM) classifier performs fault diagnosis and classification on the test data. The diagnosis results show that a pinpoint accuracy can be achieved using the proposed method in the diagnosis of composite faults in aviation generators.