The Flippin-Lodge and Bürgi-Dunitz angles were central, practically, to the development of a clearer understanding of asymmetric induction during nucleophilic attack at hindered carbonyl centers in synthetic organic chemistry. It was in this area that  was first defined by Heathcock, and has been primarily used. Larger substituents around the electrophilic center, such as tert-butyls, lead to higher stereoselectivities in asymmetric induction than smaller substituents like methyls. The trajectory of the nucleophile approaching a center flanked by two large substituents is more limited, i.e. the Flippin–Lodge angle is smaller. For example, in Mukaiyama aldol addition, the bulkier phenyl tert-butyl ketone has a higher selectivity for the syn isomer than the smaller phenyl methyl ketone. Likewise, if bulky a nucleophile, such as a t-butylmethylsilyl enolate, is used, the selectivity is higher than for a small nucleophile like a lithium enolate.
Given a reaction system of a given nucleophile with a carbonyl having the two substituents R and R, where substituent R is sterically small relative to substituent R (e.g., R = hydrogen atom, R = phenyl), the  values that are inferred from the reaction outcomes and theoretical studies tend to be larger; alternatively, if the hydrocarbon substituents are nearer or equal in steric size, the inferred values diminish and may approach zero (e.g., R = tert-butyl, R = phenyl). Thus, from the perspective of simpler electrophile systems where only steric bulk come into play, the attack trajectories of the classes of nucleophiles studied makes clear that as the disparity in size between the substituent increase, there is a perturbation in the FL angle that can be used to provide higher stereoselectivities in designed reaction systems; while the patterns become more complex when factors other than steric bulk come into play (see section above on orbital contributions), Flippin, Lodge, and Heathcock were able to show that generalizations could be made that were useful to reaction design.
A surpassing area of application has been in studies of various aldol reactions, the addition of ketone-derived enol/enolate nucleophiles to electrophilic aldehydes, each with functional groups varying in size and group polarity; the way that features on the nucleophile and electrophile impact the stereochemistry seen in reaction products, and in particular, the diastereoselection exhibited, has been carefully mapped (see the steric and orbital description above, the aldol reaction article, and David Evans related Harvard teaching materials on the aldol). These studies have improved the chemists abilities to design enantioselective and diastereoselective reactions needed in the construction of complex molecules, such as the natural product spongistatins and modern drugs. It remains to be seen whether a particular range of  values contributes similarly to the arrangement of functional groups within proteins and so to their conformational stabilities (as has been reported in relation to the BD trajectory), or to other BD-correlated stabilizations of conformation important to structure and reactivity.