The fretting fatigue life of full-scale dovetail joints in two contact configurations was estimated using the theory of critical distance with the area method (TCD-AM) and the mesh control method (TCD-MC). The TCD-MC method demonstrated prediction accuracy comparable to the traditional TCD-AM method, while improving computational efficiency by 85 %. By incorporating a calibration strategy with the TCD-MC method, the predicted fatigue life was within the scatter band of factor 3 when compared with the experimental data, indicating its reliability. The proposed parameter-fitting method for TCD-MC yielded results nearly identical to the conventional method, while reducing the workload by 75 %. The TCD-MC method is expected to provide a potentially novel and convenient approach for fretting fatigue life prediction in full-scale specimen.