Patent ID: 8695219
Filing Date: 2014-04-15
Classification: B64F,Y10T

Abstract:
1. A method of making an airplane wing, comprising: fastening stringers to a first wing skin panel and a second wing skin panel; after fastening stringers to the first wing skin panel and the second wing skin panel, normalizing the position of each wing skin panel to determine a normalized position that accounts for changes to a size of each wing skin panel during fastening; trimming each wing skin panel using the normalized position, the trimming creating an upper wing panel and a lower wing panel; supporting two airplane wing spars in chordwise spaced relationship on a supporting structure; positioning a plurality of in-spar ribs between said spars by aligning coordination holes in opposite ends of said in spar ribs with corresponding coordination holes in rib posts attached to said spars; connecting said ribs to said rib posts to produce a wing box frame; probing the two airplane wing spars to obtain accurate position information for the airplane wing spars with respect to the ribs on the supporting structure; updating a part program in a machine tool controller with the accurate position information of said spars on said supporting structure, said part program incorporating data from a digital wing product definition containing dimension and positioning information of said wing spars on said supporting structure; machining a coordination feature on one of the two airplane wing spars and the plurality of in-spar ribs to produce machined coordination features based on the updated position information; and after producing the wing box frame, positioning the upper and lower wing panels on said wing box frame at certain positions by registering coordination features on said wing panels with corresponding machined coordination features on said wing box frame.