Melnikov's method was adopted to study chaotic vibrations and chaos suppression of a two-dimensional subsonic panel with geometric nonlinearity subjected to external excitation. A Galerkin-type solution was introduced to derive the aerodynamic pressure from the linearized potential equation. Galerkin method was used to transform the governing partial differential equation to a series of ordinary differential equations. Based on Melnikov's method, the chaotic behaviors of the panel system were analyzed and suppressed by adding a parametric excitation term to the chaotic system. The numerical results illustrating the feasibility of the method are presented as bifurcation diagrams, phase plots, Poincaré maps, time-history diagrams and maximum Lyapunov exponent diagrams. The method used in this paper leads to fully consistent results. Comparison between the first-order and four-order expansion shows that the first-order expansion can qualitatively reflect the dynamical features of the plate.