About ...
| ... me |
|---|
|
I graduated as aeronautical engineer at the Delft University. For
most of my working life I have been employed at the National
Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) in Amsterdam, working on helicopter
related topics. Activities range from flight performance to flying
qualities, from helicopter pre-design to flight testing, from
operational support to flight simulations, from flight safety
to ...... (whatever).
In my (ancient) spare time I used to be an aircraft spotter. But that did not give me sufficient satisfaction. Once I had decided to go for helicopters, it was a small step to start collecting civil rotorcraft registrations. At first just for The Netherlands, then also for Belgium and Luxemburg, and next for Europe. Soon this evolved into a worldwide database. |
| ... my database |
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The database contains registration data for civil rotorcraft. This
includes information on registration, helicopter type, construction
number, registration history, and final fate. There is no
owner/user/operator info in the database and the data are strictly
used for non-commercial purposes. The data are grouped in civil
rotorcraft registers for every country in the world.
In July 2010 the database contained more than 126 800 civil rotorcraft registrations for about 72 500 individual rotorcraft. Over the years the database has been growing with a nearly constant increase of about 6350 registrations and about 3450 individual rotorcraft per year. I have coded my own computer programs to e.g. extract production lists from my database, or to automatically generate the 200+ html-files contained on this web site. |
| ... my web site |
|
The database information is made publicly available through this
ROTORSPOT web site, where one can find complete (historical)
civil rotorcraft registers for every country in the world. The main
purpose of this site is to provide quick access to helicopter type,
identity, registration and history. E.g. when someone has a registration
and is looking for the correct type or identity, the web site will
provide it. Based on that first step, one then can make further research
using other, more elaborate sources.
The first release ever of my web site was on September 1st, 1999. Over the years the web site has been hosted by several free hosting providers. But when Yahoo / GeoCities announced that they would end their free service I concluded that it was time to start my own web space at www.rotorspot.nl. Then I also took the opportunity to do a major revamp of the web site, giving it a more up-to-date look. All CSS and HTML code on this web site has been validated for standards compliance using appropriate tools. Although this guarantees an error-free web site, it does not guarantee an error-free appearance in different browsers. So, if you do encounter problems of any kind, feel free to inform me and I wil do my best to correct the situation as soon as possible. |
