The Editor, Professor Haydn Thompson, has 21 years’ experience working in a mixture of senior industrial research and development roles in flight control systems, space programmes and signal processing applications. In 1993 he joined the newly initiated Rolls-Royce Control and Systems University Technology Centre as Programme Manager. He is a consultant to Rolls-Royce, the MoD and the European Commission. He has over 60 publications on applications of distributed systems, multi-disciplinary multi-objective optimisation and gas turbine engine control and fault diagnosis. He has also written a book on gas turbine engine control. He is a member of the International Federation of Automatic Control’s (IFAC) International Aerospace Control, Mechatronics and Real-Time Computing and Control Committees, the Institution of Electronic and Electrical Engineers Aerospace Committee, and IEE representative on committees at the IMechE and Royal Aeronautical Society. He is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.