page_title: Gimbal lock
section_title: In three dimensions
hierarchical_section_title: Gimbal lock / In engineering / In three dimensions
caption_attribution_description: English: This animation shows a plane get into Gimbal lock. I made the animation, including the models, myself with Blender and release it under CC0.
context_page_description: Gimbal lock is the loss of one degree of freedom in a three-dimensional, three-gimbal mechanism that occurs when the axes of two of the three gimbals are driven into a parallel configuration, "locking" the system into rotation in a degenerate two-dimensional space.
  The word lock is misleading: no gimbal is restrained. All three gimbals can still rotate freely about their respective axes of suspension. Nevertheless, because of the parallel orientation of two of the gimbals' axes there is no gimbal available to accommodate rotation about one axis.
context_section_description: Consider a case of a level-sensing platform on an aircraft flying due north with its three gimbal axes mutually perpendicular (i.e., roll, pitch and yaw angles each zero). If the aircraft pitches up 90 degrees, the aircraft and platform's yaw axis gimbal becomes parallel to the roll axis gimbal, and changes about yaw can no longer be compensated for.
caption: Gimbal locked airplane. When the pitch (green) and yaw (magenta) gimbals become aligned, changes to roll (blue) and yaw apply the same rotation to the airplane.