In the aviation manufacturing industry， complex aircraft components can hardly be completely measured in the digital measurement process. This paper proposes a scanning path generation method based on feature recognition. For the digital model of an aircraft component， based on its slot and rib features， we aim at providing several scanning paths for the scanner holder， i.e.， a robotic arm， to finely and completely scan features. We segment and extract the surfaces of aircraft components into parts based on the region segmentation method. Considering that the surfaces of hard-to-scan areas， i.e.， slots and ribs， are usually approximately perpendicular to the scanning direction， the parts that satisfy the perpendicular criterion are gathered as a basis for subsequent processing among the surface of parts after segmentation. By analyzing the extracted features of these surfaces， we plan the scan path as follow： Each surface is projected into a two-dimensional plane， and a suitable scanning path is generated； After projecting the path back into three dimensions， it is adjusted along a specific angle to generate the final scanning path. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately generate the scanning path， which is practical for digital measurement in the aviation manufacturing industry.