The Aerospace vertical at apis.io/industries/aerospace/ tracks 23 providers and 23 APIs across two sub-sectors — aircraft systems and components, and aircraft engines and systems.
Twenty-three companies. Twenty-three APIs. And seven of those companies publish zero.
This is the emptiest vertical on the network.
The bands
| Band | Providers | APIs |
|---|---|---|
| Thin | Airbus 43.6, RTX 43.3 | 7, 3 |
| Emerging | General Dynamics 27.8, TransDigm 24.8, Honeywell 24.1, Boeing 20.1, HEICO 16.5 | 0–9 |
| Minimal | Moog 14.9, BAE Systems 12.4, Textron 12.1, L3Harris 11.4, GE Aerospace 10.9, Carpenter Technology 10.3, Rolls-Royce 8.2 | 0 |
Airbus tops the vertical at 43.6 — a thin score. Rolls-Royce, which builds some of the most instrumented machinery on earth, scores 8.2 with zero published APIs. GE Aerospace: 10.9, zero. BAE Systems, Textron, L3Harris, Moog: all zero.
Boeing is the odd entry — 9 APIs, more than Airbus, and a 20.1 emerging score. Volume without description, the same pattern Mercedes-Benz showed in automotive.
Why this vertical is empty
Two forces, and unlike consumer goods, neither is going away.
Classification. A large share of aerospace revenue is defense. L3Harris, BAE, General Dynamics, and Textron sell systems whose interfaces are controlled by ITAR and equivalent regimes. There is no version of a public API program for a targeting system. Zero is the correct number.
Certification. Commercial aviation software is certified to standards like DO-178C, where every interface change triggers re-verification. That economics makes the iterative, versioned, publish-and-improve model of modern API programs structurally unattractive. An interface that is expensive to change is an interface you do not publish casually.
The Rolls-Royce paradox
Rolls-Royce is the sharpest illustration. Its engine business runs on data — the company pioneered selling thrust as a service, monitoring engines continuously and charging by the flight hour. That is one of the most-cited examples of a data-driven industrial business model in existence.
And it scores 8.2 with zero public APIs.
The data absolutely exists. It flows to Rolls-Royce and to the airlines under contract. It is simply never exposed as a described, publicly discoverable interface — because the customer is a handful of airlines with negotiated agreements, not a developer ecosystem.
Takeaway
23 providers, 23 APIs, seven companies at zero, and a ceiling in the thin band. Aerospace is the vertical where the absence is most defensible — classification and certification are real constraints, not neglect — and it is still worth recording that the industry generating the richest machine telemetry on earth publishes almost none of it.