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Tooling structures to make wing/wing, fuselage/fuselage, and wing/fuselage mates have long been rather massive tools. Not only are these tools large and expensive, but they often obstruct the very drilling and fastening work to be done in the mate tool. Furthermore, these legacy mate tools can only do one job - a mate tool cannot be used for a different airplane, or even a different part of the same airplane. A flexible, more versatile system will lower the cost of aircraft with a low quantity production run planned, and a more open design can reduce the cost of assembly on a high production aircraft. This paper will discuss the development and recent breakthroughs that allow the mating of any size aircraft sections with very high precision using only a set of specialized jacks that provide six degrees-of-freedom coupled with a non-contact measurement system.