Best of Aerospace defense

The 10 Best Aerospace & Defense Datasets in 2026

10 Aerospace defense picks, ranked on what's inside: field richness, coverage depth, fit for the job. FAA Aircraft Registry leads.

  • 10ranked picks
  • 40documented fields on stage
  • 0/8with mapped coverage

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Every dataset here carries a 0–10 score built on documented fields, and the ranking follows those scores. When records tie, coverage breaks it: more geography, deeper history, finer granularity. Cadence isn't a scoring axis — it's a delivery setting. Delivered daily, weekly, or hourly, your call.

  1. 1 ANS Performance - ATC Performance Data
  2. 2 EUROCONTROL Aviation Data Dashboard
  3. 3 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    FAA Aircraft Registry

    with satellite-table layouts on request · NAME …+22 more

    Count who owns what by registrant type, make-model-series and state, and watch fractional-ownership flags mark the shared-ownership segment most analyses miss.

  4. 4 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    NTSB Aviation Accident Incident Database

    10 verified case-level fields …+7 more

    One record per accident/incident case, with aircraft-level detail per case.

  5. 5 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    SIPRI Military Expenditure Database

  6. 6 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    World Bank Military Expenditure Indicator API

    One observation per entity per year per measure.

  7. 7 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    OurAirports Data

  8. 8 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    NASA Open Data Portal

  9. 9 9/10
    Aerospace defense

    SIPRI Arms Transfers Database

  10. 10 8/10
    Aerospace defense

    Space-Track Space Catalog API

    norad_cat_id · object_name · epoch …+2 more

Frequently asked questions

Which aerospace & defense dataset covers the longest time span?

The Aviation Safety Network Database indexes airliner, corporate jet and military transport accidents from 1919 to present - more than 23,000 occurrence records. For spending, the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database runs from 1949 to 2025 across 170+ countries, and its Arms Transfers sibling records deals from 1950 onward.

How many US aircraft registrations does the FAA registry cover?

MASTER.txt holds 316,086 active N-number records and DEREG.txt adds about 2.7 million deregistered history records. Reference files decode 93,984 manufacturer/model/series combinations and 4,752 engine references, and some owner fields are blank because private owners may withhold personally identifiable information.

Can I track every satellite in orbit?

Space-Track's catalogue lists roughly 51,500 tracked objects - about 12,000 active payloads and 22,900 debris pieces - with more than 138 million historical element sets in GP_HISTORY. About 16,600 analyst objects have their element sets withheld from publication, so the usable catalogue is smaller than the headline total.

Does Datadory sell the underlying government sources or add value on top?

Datadory delivers the records these publishers maintain - normalized schemas, documented fields, stable join keys, and sample rows before commitment. You get one contract across all four aerospace & defense clusters instead of maintaining separate extractions for registry, safety, procurement and orbital data yourself.