This might help...

Keep track of the current up, look, and right vectors of the ship. When you need to pitch up rotate by these axis.

Be sure to normalize and true these axises by each other after rotating them, by doing something like this:

// cross product of Up and Look vectors
m_vRight = GVector3CrossProduct(m_vUp, m_vLook);
m_vRight = GVector3Normalize(m_vRight);

// cross product of Look and Right vectors
m_vUp = GVector3CrossProduct(m_vLook, m_vRight);
m_vUp = GVector3Normalize(m_vUp);



You can get the full transform to align the ships vectors with the world space by the following:

// Right to x axis
matTransform._11 = m_vRight.x;
matTransform._21 = m_vRight.y;
matTransform._31 = m_vRight.z;
matTransform._41 = 0;

// Up to y axis
matTransform._12 = m_vUp.x;
matTransform._22 = m_vUp.y;
matTransform._32 = m_vUp.z;
matTransform._42 = 0;

// Look to z axis
matTransform._13 = m_vLook.x;
matTransform._23 = m_vLook.y;
matTransform._33 = m_vLook.z;
matTransform._43 = 0;

// complete the matrix
matTransform._14 = 0;
matTransform._24 = 0;
matTransform._34 = 0;
matTransform._44 = 1;


So the whole thing would go like this:
1. Do the above transform to the axises to temporally align the ship with the world axises.
2. Rotate the axises as you would normally do.
3. Use the transpose matrix of the first matrix transform to get back to actual world coordinates for the axises.
4. Do this for each axis. Then normalize and true the axises.

To display the ship or view from the ship apply the transpose of the above transform (using the current ship’s vectors to calculate the transform).