Air transportation
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in for-hire, common-carrier transportation of people and/or goods using aircraft, such as airplanes and helicopters. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 960
- Under 10 employeesA
- 53%
- Establishments · USA
- 4,645
- Employment · USA
- 493,888
- Payroll · USA
- $47.1B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 960 Canadian establishments with employees, 53% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 481, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Scheduled airlines are not an entry market. Charter, specialty and northern operations are regional niches under heavy regulation.
- Who sets the price
- Route competition and fuel.
- The software it runs on
- Reservations, operations control and maintenance tracking.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
No operating-business record sits in this industry — the records filed here are software markets, shown in the next section.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Under a hundred meaningful airline buyers in North America, each running certification-bound systems where a defect grounds aircraft. Passenger service system migrations are famous industry-wide events. MRO is the more approachable sub-segment but is regulated as an airworthiness system, which puts certification ahead of first revenue. Sourced update: the airline software estate is disclosed and large — Amadeus at €6.517B and Sabre at $2.8B — and both sell the operations layer as part of a distribution relationship the carrier cannot easily unpick.
The buyer universe is in the low thousands and the incumbent is consolidating it. As at July 2025 there were approximately 1,800 US charter operators with more than 11,000 aircraft on their certificates [B, trade press reporting the FAA Part 135 list; the FAA's own page refuses automated retrieval, so this is secondary rather than primary]. Split between Part 135 charter operators and Part 91 corporate flight departments, at reachable ACVs, that is the same arithmetic that cut equipment rental at 5324 — a workable business, not a venture-scale one. Above it the field is being rolled up: CAMP Systems, owned by Hearst since 2016 when it was acquired from GTCR [A, Hearst], agreed in March 2024 to acquire the Avinode Group and World Kinect's portfolio of FBO software [A, Hearst], and Portside raised $50M from Insight Partners and took over the rights to Wheels Up's Avianis platform [B]. The regulatory floor is also higher than ordinary vertical SaaS: maintenance tracking is an airworthiness system, where a defect grounds aircraft and certification precedes first revenue — the same barrier the 4811 record found in MRO. Nothing is disclosed here. CAMP sits inside Hearst, which is private and does not break out the line, and every challenger named is private, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 12
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| SabreNASDAQ:SABR | Scheduled air transportation4811 | $2.8B | 1/6 |
| AmadeusAMADY | Scheduled air transportation4811 | — | 2/6 |
| CAMP Systems InternationalPrivate | Non-scheduled chartered air transportation481214 | — | 1/6 |
| FarelPrivate | Scheduled air transportation4811 | — | 3/6 |
| FL3XXPrivate | Non-scheduled chartered air transportation481214 | — | 2/6 |
| ForeFlightPrivate | Non-scheduled chartered air transportation481214 | — | 3/6 |
| IBS SoftwarePrivate | Scheduled air transportation4811 | — | 4/6 |
| Leon SoftwarePrivate | Non-scheduled chartered air transportation481214 | — | 4/6 |
| PortsidePrivate | Non-scheduled chartered air transportation481214 | — | 5/6 |
| Ramco AviationPrivate | Scheduled air transportation4811 | — | 5/6 |
| TraxPrivate | Scheduled air transportation4811 | — | 6/6 |
| VeryonPrivate | Non-scheduled chartered air transportation481214 | — | 6/6 |
Who works here
The occupations employed in Transportation and warehousing, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
2 rows sit directly beneath 481, and 7 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4811 | Scheduled air transportation | 419 | Airline Operations & MRO Software |
| 4812 | Non-scheduled air transportation | 541 | Business Aviation Flight Operations Software |