One assignee leads with 52 of the 163 records in this dataset, well ahead of the rest of the field — fifth place holds 6 records and tenth place holds 4. The top five assignees combined account for 62.6% of all records, and the top ten reach 79.1%, so filing is heavily concentrated at the top rather than spread evenly across the 38 ranked companies. This concentration typically means the foundational control-logic claims are already staked out by the leader, leaving newer filers to work around narrower or adjacent claims.

Filing peaked at 30 records in 2018 and has since settled lower, falling 33% from 18 filings in 2021 to 12 in 2024 — the last year in this dataset that can be treated as a complete count. Figures for 2025 and 2026 look lower still, but that reflects publication lag of roughly 18 months rather than an actual drop in filing activity. Anyone drawing conclusions from the most recent one to two years should treat those numbers as provisional undercounts.

The clearest gaps sit in classes with low record shares relative to the field’s core: unmanned aerial vehicle applications (B64U) appear in only 5.5% of the 163 records, and ground installation support (B64F) in just 4.3%, against roughly 49% each for the two dominant aircraft-equipment and aeroplane classes. Sub-areas such as UAV-adapted stall detection, bank angle limiting for autonomous platforms, and buffet boundary sensing integration are correspondingly thin. These are the branches where a first-mover claim is more likely to clear prior art cleanly.