Practical guidance is offered for welding in compliance with the AWS D17.2 Specification for Resistance Welding for Aerospace Applications on how to increase weld quality assurance, increase productivity, and reduce production downtime.  This includes how to apply alternate testing methods to eliminate destructive coupon lot testing, which can realize typical 25% production throughput increases.  Methods will be presented to address part fitup, surface condition, electrode monitoring, in-process monitoring of critical process parameters, and applying real time adaptive controls.  The use of process capability measurements to calculate the percent of welds that meet strength or size requirements, needed to prove that welding reliability exceeds 99.5% at all times will also be presented.  Methods of further increasing productivity through the substitution of in-process weld control monitoring in place of manual surface resistance checking, to automatically detect when a micro-ohms shift outside of the specification range occurs will also be presented. Learn how to reduce labor and downtime associated with periodical machine inspections by taking advantage of a new clause that allows machine maintenance to only be performed when necessary.