A FAI eats up days per part — iLEAN builds AS9102 Forms 1, 2 and 3. The person signs.

The problem

The FAI is not hard — it is slow, repetitive, and it ties up your best quality people.

Every aerospace quality manager knows the drill: the first part of a new program (or of a drawing revision) comes off the machine, and the FAI begins. You have to measure every numbered characteristic on the drawing — dimensions, geometric tolerances, finish, marking, materials, special processes. You have to transfer every measurement into AS9102 Form 3, link the material in Form 2, complete Form 1 with the part identification. Three to five days of a senior technician per part. Twelve NPIs a year, sixty days of quality time on FAI alone.

When the customer shows up with a drawing revision, you start over — because AS9102 requires a partial FAI on the affected characteristics. The FAI is not done badly: it is done slowly, by the people the rest of the plant needs most. And when there is a rush, the risk is decisive: one characteristic mismeasured or skipped, and the part comes back from the customer with a nonconformity.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN does not replace the inspector — it takes the dumb work off their hands so they can do the work that matters.

A FAI has two parts: the capture and comparison against the drawing (repetitive, perfectly bounded, mechanizable work) and the judgment (does this deviation matter functionally? is this finish visually acceptable?). iLEAN takes care of the first; the person takes care of the second. It is assist and simplify, not replace: the quality manager stops spending the day keying in measurements and spends it validating what they decide.

Vision 3D scans. The virtual CMM measures against the model. Writer composes the AS9102 FAIR. Tracer links materials and processes. The person signs — never the other way around.

The three iLEAN pieces applied to the AS9102 FAI:

• iLEAN Vision (3D) + Edge — a structured-light or laser scanner over the part on the inspection table, producing a dense point cloud. The virtual CMM compares it with the CAD model from the drawing (STEP, MBD with PMI), measures every geometric characteristic against its tolerance, and returns value + deviation + acceptance. For characteristics that can only be measured with a physical instrument (thread gauge, surface roughness tester), the operator captures the value by voice into Connect — no typing.
• iLEAN Writer — an agent that composes the three AS9102 forms from the captured data: Form 1 (part identification + traceability), Form 2 (materials from Tracer, special processes, sub-assemblies), Form 3 (each characteristic with its drawing tolerance, the value measured by Vision or captured by voice, and the acceptance result). The FAIR comes out with the graphic evidence already attached (point cloud, image of the marking, material certificates).
• iLEAN Tracer + Connect — Tracer links the material used in the first part (heat lot, mill cert, sub-assemblies), which flows into Form 2. Connect captures the functional result from the test bench (leak test, load test), whether it arrives by direct integration or from the technician's Excel sheet — nothing typed twice.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Manual FAI with CMM and Excel vs. FAI assisted by iLEAN

Aspect	Manual FAI + CMM + Excel	With iLEAN Vision 3D + Writer + Tracer
Capturing drawing characteristics	Technician extracts each characteristic from the PDF by hand	Writer extracts them automatically from the MBD/STEP or from the PDF with OCR
Dimensional measurement	Classic CMM, characteristic by characteristic	3D scan and virtual CMM — all geometric characteristics at once
Filling in Form 3	Keying the measured value into an Excel/Word template	Automatic, with graphic evidence attached
Form 2 (material, processes)	Filled in by hand with CofCs in a folder	Linked by Tracer from the very start
Drawing revision (partial FAI)	Redo the affected characteristics manually	Writer detects the change and redoes only what is affected
FAI time per part	3-5 days of a senior technician	Hours — the manager reviews and signs

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your plant. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Tier-1 plant with recurring NPIs (on the order of 10-20 new parts or drawing revisions per year), in-house 5-axis machining, functional testing on its own bench.
• Vision 3D + Writer pilot on the part family with the most NPIs (the Pareto of the quality calendar). First value expected within a few weeks: the FAIR for that family builds itself; the manager reviews and signs.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months. Levers: senior quality time recovered (sixty days/year back on the floor), shorter NPI lead time (sales can commit to tighter dates), fewer paperwork nonconformities at delivery.
• A reduction in FAI time per part of ≥50% is a prudent target; plants that already run Vision 3D bring it down further.

And the quality director's reasonable doubt

“What if the AI mismeasures a critical characteristic?” — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. Vision 3D does not “have an opinion” about the measurement: it produces a value from the point cloud against the CAD model, with bounded uncertainty (the scanner's own, perfectly known). In anchored tasks, the best models brought error below 1.5% ^[1]. And even so, the FAIR does not approve itself: the manager reviews every critical characteristic before signing, and iLEAN's three safety rings guarantee that no agent touches the OT network or changes a single piece of the customer's CAD data.

^[1] OpenAI paper “Why Language Models Hallucinate”, 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.