Call for paper | Smart Aircraft 3.0: Challenges and Advances
image: Call for paper | Smart Aircraft 3.0: Challenges and Advances
Credit: Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
With the advances in smart materials and structures, integrated sensors and actuators, and AI technologies, the smart aircraft is becoming a new generation emergent and disruptive aeronautical technology. Based on the international symposium on Smart Aircraft 2019, Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (CJA) organized the first special topic on smart aircraft 1.0 published in 2021. The second special topic on smart aircraft 2.0 was published in 2024, based on the Sino-European Joint Workshop on Morphing Structures on 7 July, 2022 including CAE, DRL, CIRA and also some universities from China, UK and Italy. The two special topics received great attention in the smart aircraft community.
In the past several years, both Europe and China have made great progress in smart aircraft and morphing wings. With the support of CJA, it's our honour to continue organizing the special topic on smart aircraft 3.0, to highlight the challenges and recent advances in smart aircraft technologies related to new flight principles, new flow mechanisms, new structural conceptions and new control strategies. The smart aircraft 3.0 will focus on, but not limited to：
● Smart aircraft aerodynamics, intelligent propulsion, and conceptual design
● Smart material and morphing structures
●AI-enabled flight dynamics modelling, control and decision-making
● Aerospace cross-domain and intelligent flight
● Other topics related to the smart and morphing aircraft
Guest Editors
Prof. Constantinos Soutis, FREng, FMCAE, is Professor Emeritus of Aerospace and Materials Engineering at the University of Manchester and Director and co-Founder of Manchester Robotics Ltd., a spin-out company from the University of Manchester, a solution provider and robotic platform builder, a "lab in a robot", for independent learning in STEM education. Prof. Soutis has 40 years of experience in working with composite structures, a leading authority in mechanics and failure of composites, with significant contributions in modelling damage and structural health monitoring using low frequency Lamb waves techniques. He is Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, elected in August 2014, and in November 2025, he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) for exceptional and sustained contributions to aircraft composite materials. Prof. Soutis is the author or co-author of over 450 archived highly cited articles (Google Scholar h-index=78 and Scopus h-index=66) with over 50 PhD students qualified under his guidance.
Dr. Rosario Pecora was born in Napoli, Italy and received his PhD degree from the University of Naples Federico II (UNINA) in 2005. He worked as an associate professor and head of the Smart Structures Laboratory in UNINA. He received the National Scientific Recognition of his technical and scientific maturity (eligible to the role of Associate Professor) in 2017. His research activity is mainly focused on aeroservoelasticity of unconventional structural systems, structures dynamics and smart structures while covering leading roles in major European and extra-European projects (CAPECON, Clean Sky GRA, SARISTU, CRIAQ-MDO505, Cleans Sky 2). He has worked for many EU aircraft manufacturing companies and research centers as technical advisor for loads, aeroelasticity, aircraft structures design and certification. Currently, he is also an editorial board member of CJA.
Prof. Chen Gang received his PhD degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University in 2006. He is currently a full professor of the School of Aerospace Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University. His research interests include fluid-structure interaction and bionic flow control technology of flexible aircraft, data-driven and AI-enable fluid dynamics, flight dynamics and artificial intelligent control of smart aircraft. He has published more than 100 papers and finished more than 30 grants supported by the government and industrial partners.
Important Dates
Suggested Deadline : 31 July, 2026
Released date of article collection: FY 2027
Submission Guidelines
CJA is an international, peer-reviewed, and open-access journal of aerospace engineering published by Elsevier. The latest SCI impact factor is 5.7, which ranks JCR Q1 among journals of Aerospace Engineering. Prospective authors are invited to submit their manuscripts electronically, adhering to CJA guidelines. Please submit your papers through the online system
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/chinese-journal-of-aeronautics
and download the Title-Page from
http://hkxb.buaa.edu.cn/CN/column86.shtml.
Be sure to select the special issue or special section name (VSI: Smart Aircraft 3.0: Challenges and Advances). Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the CJA online system.
Managing Editor
LI Mingmin
010-82317060
About Chinese Journal of Aeronautics
Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (CJA) is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal covering all aspects of aerospace engineering, monthly published by Elsevier. The Journal reports the scientific and technological achievements and frontiers in aeronautic engineering and astronautic engineering, in both theory and practice. CJA is indexed in SCI (IF = 5.7, Q1), EI, IAA, AJ, CSA, Scopus.