An
aircraft in flight is free to rotate in three dimensions:
pitch, nose up or down about an axis running from wing to wing;
yaw, nose left or right about an axis running up and down; and
roll, rotation about an axis running from nose to tail. The axes are alternatively designated as
lateral,
vertical, and
longitudinal. These axes
move with the vehicle and rotate relative to the Earth along with the craft. These definitions were analogously applied to
spacecraft when the first manned spacecraft were designed in the late 1950s.