The articles in this special section focus on the use of computational intelligence in the aerospace industry. In an expanding world with limited resources, Computational Intelligence has become a necessity to handle the complexity of systems and processes. The aerospace sector, in particular, has stringent performance requirements on highly complex systems for which solutions are expected to be optimal and reliable at the same time. Computational intelligence techniques have been widely used to find solutions to global single or multi-objective optimization problems, including mixed variables, multi-modal and non-differentiable quantities.