Airport operations

Airports buy through multi-year public tenders written around SITA and Amadeus, and the certification path runs through IATA standards and the airlines that must interoperate. The airline record at 4811 cut on the same procurement wall from the other side of the apron.

This market has three layers. Two have already been bought, and the third has a history of companies running out of money. (1) Fleet operations and reality capture. This is the software a construction, energy or public-safety drone team plans flights in, logs pilots and aircraft in, and processes imagery with. The pure-play leader is now part of a construction suite: Procore agreed on 27 July 2026 to buy DroneDeploy for about $845.0M in cash and completed the merger on 9 September 2026 [A]. DroneDeploy had said in September 2025 that it had reached break-even and was used on more than 1.7 million sites. At the deal it claimed over 3 million jobsites in more than 180 countries [C]. In public safety, Versaterm (Ottawa, Banneker-backed) bought DroneSense in July 2025 and then Aloft in early 2026 [B]. That puts fleet management, FAA authorisation and dispatch in one police and fire suite. DJI's own FlightHub 2 is bundled with the hardware most operators fly. (2) Autonomy OS. This is the flight-software layer drone makers license. It is now a defence market. Auterion (Arlington, Virginia and Munich) raised a $130M Series B in September 2025, led by Bessemer, with $25M of it non-dilutive capital backed by the Office of Strategic Capital [B]. In February 2026 Resilience Media reported, from unnamed sources, that Auterion was profitable and on track for about $200M of revenue from signed contracts [C]. The free floor beneath it is open source: PX4 and ArduPilot are both open-source autopilots, and Auterion's own homepage says the US Defense Innovation Unit standardises on PX4 and MAVLink. (3) Airspace authorisation and UTM. This is where the casualties are. In the US, LAANC is free to the pilot, and one supplier processes most of it: Aloft says it handles 85% of all monthly LAANC authorisations [C]. Verizon closed Skyward on 30 June 2022 [B]. AirMap shut its app and left LAANC on 22 June 2023, after DroneUp had bought it in 2021 [B]. The UK's Altitude Angel went into administration on 7 October 2025, and Indra agreed to buy its GuardianUTM assets in January 2026 [A for the notice and the release]. National UTM contracts go to air-navigation suppliers and ANSP-backed firms: Indra, Unifly (DFS is a major shareholder; NAV CANADA, ENAIRE and Malaysia's ClearPath) and ANRA (Dubai, 2025) [B]. The open door is the US rule that has not arrived. The Part 108 BVLOS rule, proposed in August 2025, has been in White House review since July 2026 by secondary accounts. It would create paid roles for automated data service providers, but the companies best placed for them (Aloft/Versaterm, ANRA, Airspace Link) are already approved suppliers. A further turn: the FCC added foreign-made drones and components to its Covered List on 22 December 2025, which blocks new DJI models in the US [B]. That helps US fleet software only if non-DJI hardware supply grows. How it differs from its neighbours: 4881-airport-operations-and-ground-handling-systems covers crewed-aviation airport and apron systems sold through SITA and Amadeus tenders. 336410-aerospace-defence-and-space-systems covers the airframe and defence primes. Counter-drone detection is not covered here. Willingness to pay decides it: the authorisation layer is free by regulation, and the layers people do pay for have been bought by Procore, Versaterm and the defence primes' investees.

The software that keeps an aircraft airworthy, and the planning tools that decide how many spares an air force buys, are bought once a decade and are already owned by the companies that do the maintenance. This record covers maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) systems of record — maintenance tracking, work orders, parts and engineering records for airlines, MRO shops and military fleets — and the defence sustainment layer above them: spares optimisation, life-cycle cost and readiness analysis. IFS is the broadest incumbent: Aerospace & Defence is one of its named focus industries, it reported more than EUR 1.2B of total revenue for 2024 and was valued at over EUR 15B in an April 2025 minority sale in which Hg became co-control owner alongside EQT [A]. The commercial MRO specialists have already been taken in by their customers' own industry. AMOS, which Swiss-AS says runs 10,000+ aircraft for 270+ customers, became a 100% subsidiary of Lufthansa Technik — one of the largest MRO providers — in 2023 [C]. AAR, an MRO and parts group with FY2026 sales of $3,308.0M, bought Trax for $120.0M in cash plus up to a $20.0M earn-out in March 2023 (about 5,000 aircraft supported) and Aerostrat's long-range maintenance planning for $19.0M in August 2025 [A]. Veryon (formerly Aircraft Technical Publishers, founded 1973) has rolled up Flightdocs, CaseBank, Rusada (ENVISION), RCMBT, EBIS and, in September 2026, Polaris Aero, and says it serves 5,500+ customers [C]. Ramco Aviation is the one listed specialist, but inside a company with only $71.09M of FY2025 income and a net loss of $4.08M [A]. On the defence side the money moves through sole-source renewals and ERP programmes, not open competition. The US Air Force has used PTC's Servigistics since 2017 to plan what PTC called a $76B service-parts supply chain; a 2022 contract was worth up to $95M over five years, and it was renewed again on 15 October 2026 under the ESCAPE programme, terms undisclosed [B]. Systecon's Opus Suite (OPUS10, SIMLOX, CATLOC) lists the US Navy and Air Force, French and Brazilian air forces, Australia's and Singapore's defence ministries and primes from BAE Systems to Saab among its users, and was bought by Swedish private-equity firm Monterro in April 2025 [B/C]. The Army is consolidating five logistics and finance systems, GCSS-Army among them, onto a single SAP platform under an eight-year Other Transaction award to Accenture Federal Services (initial $69.4M) [B] — while the Air Force's Oracle-based ECSS was cancelled in 2012 after about $1B was spent [B]. That failure is why defence buyers stick with what works. How this differs from its neighbours: 4811 airline operations covers passenger service and the airline IT estate (Amadeus, Sabre); 481214 covers business-aviation flight operations and maintenance tracking (CAMP, Veryon's Part 91/135 side); 336-PLM covers design data; 333 covers industrial predictive maintenance. This record is the MRO shop's and the military fleet's system of record and the sustainment planning tools on top of it. Distribution decides it: a few hundred airlines and MRO shops plus a short list of ministries, each changing systems about once a decade, with airworthiness approval, export-controlled technical data (ITAR/EAR), defence cloud accreditation (ATO, FedRAMP) and CMMC in front of any new entrant — and the independent specialists are already inside MRO groups, a PE roll-up or a large ERP vendor.