Abstract: The confusion faced by the high speed aircraft design, such as static stability, directional control, three channel coupling and safety limits, was introduced at the beginning of the paper. On the basis of combing the causes of high speed aircraft out of control, a series of operation and stability criteria suitable for aircraft design have been summarized in the paper. These criteria include lateral/directional aerodynamic static stability, dynamic directional stability parameter, lateral control (or aileron alone) departure parameter, Weissman criterion plane, lateral-directional stability dominant parameter and so on. Such criteria can not only predict the quality of aerodynamic layout and its influence on operation and stability characteristics in the early stage of aircraft design, but also can help engineers to improve the aerodynamic layout to get better performance of aircrafts. The control resources related to aircraft layout can be forecasted by the criteria, which help the aircraft cope with the influence of coupling reasonably. Finally, these criteria can be used to analyze the stability in the flight process and the rationality of the control strategy after the design.