Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine July 2017 - 3

From the Editor-in-Chief
JULY 2017

DOI: 10.1109/MAES.2017.177001

very month I have a ritual for writing my editorial of this Magazine. Some days before the monthly
editorial board meeting, I sit in my office or at home after dinner, with something hot or iced, depending on the season, to drink and I think of what happened in the last month that can be interesting for
our readers, an IEEE event, a conference or the anniversary of some famous inventor who contributed to
our technology.
Today I'm in Mont Saint Michel, France, sitting in the balcony of my hotel room, drinking a tea in the
misty weather of the Normandy, digging in my mind for some ideas to write this editorial. My first thought
is "you need a vacation, take a break." "Ok, I know," I answer back. Let's try again. My second thought is
"you have to finish and submit a project proposal, write two reviews and you are late. You need a vacation,
take a break." So I give up. No smart ideas for the editorial this time, only a smart suggestion. If you are in
France, or close enough, come and visit Mont Saint Michel. You will be surprised by the tides, which here
can vary greatly, at roughly 14 metres (46 ft) between high and low water marks. And there is a small hyMaria Greco
draulic dam using the waters of the river Cousnon, and the tides help to remove the accumulated silt around
Mont Saint Michel island. The picture here shows the island from the dam. When the tide is at its lowest
ebb, you can walk in the wet sand as far as 1 km from the island.
And now, let me introduce this issue.
The first article, by Y. Lim, V. Bassien-Capsa,
S. Ramasamy, J. Liu, and R. Sabatini, is dedicated to commercial airline single-pilot operations
(SPO). The main challenges (operational, technical, safety and human factors) in implementing
SPO are addressed and the system architecture
for a certifiable virtual pilot assistant (VPA) is described to enable the implementation of SPO for
commercial airliners.
The second article, "A Study of Spacecraft
Reaction Thruster Configurations for Attitude
Control System," co-authored by M. Pasand, A.
Hassani, and M. Ghorbani, examines the effects
on a spacecraft of different configurations on the
three-axis attitude control system performance using reaction thrusters.
The first two articles, unusually long for our
standards, are followed by the paper "Automatic
Target Recognition (ATR) in Missing Data Cases,"
Figure 1
by D, Lim, C, D. Gianelli, J, Li. It analyzes a hyMont Saint Michel, France
brid high-resolution imaging method for wide-angle SAR showing enhanced ATR performance for
civilian vehicle identification both for full- and missing-data cases, compared with other data-independent cases.
The last feature article of this issue is entitled "Dynamic, Data-Driven Processing of Multispectral Video Streams," by H. Li, K. Sudusinghe, Y. Liu, J. Yoon, M. Van der Schaar, E. Blasch, and S. S. Bhattacharyya. In this article, the authors introduce LDSpectral, a novel system
design within the lightweight dataflow (LD) framework, for dynamic, data-driven processing of multispectral video-streams.
The issue is completed by a student highlight by U. Papa and the book review "Radar Men: A.P. Rowe and John Strath in War and Peace,"
by H. Griffiths.
Accompanying this issue is Tutorial XI, containing excellent and informative tutorial articles on change detection, Kalman filter-based
tracking approaches, and weather radar systems.
Enjoy your summer vacation, enjoy reading, and ciao,
Maria Sabrina Greco.
JULY 2017

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine July 2017