Abstract
<jats:p>Shot peen forming and creep age forming are the principal industrial routes for generating contour in metallic aircraft wing covers. Although the mechanics of both are well documented, neither has been examined with the patent record as the unit of analysis. This study assembles comparative corpora of 157 patent families spanning 1951 to 2026, by classification-anchored retrieval and systematic citation-network tracing, coding every family by claim type and determining its jurisdictional breadth and grant outcome. The two processes exhibit measurably different bottlenecks. Creep age forming devotes 40% of its corpus to tooling against 15% for shot peen forming, whereas shot peen forming devotes 24% to control and compensation against 8% for creep age forming. The binding constraint has been geometry transfer for the former and process control for the latter, so the two routes require different de-risking strategies. Three further results follow. The foundational era of shot peen forming is tri-national rather than exclusively American. Apparent Chinese dominance of the recent record survives neither normalisation against background filing nor a breadth measure, 96% of Chinese families being filed at a single office. Citation tracing rather than classification search is required to observe such a landscape.</jats:p>