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The legacy of militarization in the autonomous aviation industry is insidious and perhaps impossible to fully disentangle. It’s the main reason I finally left the field entirely.

This goofy little language problem I puzzled over for years was, ultimately, caused by militarization.

When I was a flight test engineer, much of my job revolved around translating between young university educated aerospace / mechanical engineers and their test pilot and controls engineer colleagues, who usually had more on-the-job training.

The term “Longitudinal” was the bane of my existence.

Naval, and more broadly military aviation was the breeding ground of much of what we now consider standard practice in autonomous aviation, and so much of the terminology in this field is derived from the language of pilots and engineers at the big military aircraft companies in the 80s-90s.

IN NAVAL AVIATION (and I believe most military aviation), pilots refer to movements of the stick as either “lateral” inputs (moving the stick left to right for roll control) or “longitudinal inputs” (moving it fore-aft for pitch control).

This never satisfied me though, as this is still not the obvious datum for describing pitch rotations about the latitudinal (left-right) axis.

BUT! I think I’ve found the actual answer, and it comes from naval aviation, where many fly-by-wire electronic flight controls were first implemented.

Why, then, have most autopilots I’ve worked on used the term “longitudinal control” to describe pitch rotations (and resultant changes in altitude)?

For a long time, I thought it might be a result of a mismatch in coordinate system labeling. In human anatomy, the “longitudinal” axis is up-down.