Some in flight entertainment systems offer live news and sporting events. I guess receiving that on a plane in flight is very different than a plane on the ground.
Perhaps because it was spurious traffic "leaking" over the bus that wasn't actually intended to be there, and would be removed if anyone in the flight control systems department were told they were exposing it. And yet, that leaking data was the only way to build a cute view of travel-time or somesuch to differentiate their software for their bid, so they had to use it, and had to not mention it or request assistance with it.
In software terms, it's a bit like Windows software that relies on OS-private APIs or registry keys. Sure, the data is there to use, but it wasn't intended to be used by anything other than the OS itself, and if they could (without impacting performance), they would have made it inaccessible to userland.
But, in both of these scenarios, the platform owner always seems to be happy to see the program using "their API" once the app is released and gains traction and draws attention to the platform. That doesn't mean they do anything about the API; if it's private, it stays private; if it's deprecated, it stays deprecated. But they don't tell the company to stop once the app is out, and may even feature them in advertisements about their amazing platform.