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In today's competitive aircraft industry environment, new design, manufacturing, and assembly methods must be developed to lower costs and provide a more consistent product. One of the methods being implemented is Dimensional Management. Dimensional Management allows the evaluation of an entire manufacturing process and distribution of tolerances within that manufacturing process. Boeing has been working with Northrop-Grumman and several other suppliers to create a digital definition of the existing 747 fuselage design. This is part of an effort to implement a new manufacturing method known as Determinant Assembly. Dimensional Management plays a key role in implementing Determinant Assembly as well as incorporating into the engineering definition acceptance criteria that is better defined.

The aerospace industry uses flexible complex contoured structure in aircraft. To take advantage of advancements in engineering design, assembly methods, and inspection tools, the dimensional requirements for this kind of structure can be specified using Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) per ASME Y14.5M-1994, “Dimensioning and Tolerancing.” The 1994 revision of this standard includes some new features which can be used to specify the dimensional requirements for flexible complex contoured structure, but there are no examples on how GD&T can or should be applied. This paper gives some examples how GD&T can be applied on flexible complex contoured structure and how this usage specifies the dimensional requirements for such parts.