Notations and nomenclature for aircraft dynamics and associated aerodynamic data have evolved over many years. Common usage broadly followed the ideas laid down by Bryan, Glauert, Bryant and Gates, and extensions eventually resulted in a conglomeration of symbols which generally impeded the efforts of students, teachers, and other workers and there was little scope for making further additions in a sensible way.

Much work has been done at the Royal Aircraft Establishment to rationalise the position, and the resulting scheme is presented in RAE Technical Report TR 66200. In this scheme changes are kept to the minimum possible, existing concepts are retained, and considerable care is taken to provide a flexible system which allows an author a great deal of freedom as regards simplifying the notation in particular investigations—by omitting suffixes, for example. The RAE is confident that the new notation and nomenclature will overcome the inadequacies of existing systems.