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.

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. The database is continuously updated with new information.
Late December 2011 the database contained about 133 300 civil rotorcraft registrations for about 75 750 individual rotorcraft. Over the years the database has been growing with a nearly constant annual increase of about 6100 registrations and about 3300 individual rotorcraft.
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.

Data on this Rotorspot web site are extracted from my database. Here 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 the previous provider 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 will do my best to correct the situation as soon as possible.

This web site is a private initiative and has no links with commercial organisations. As far as I am aware, this web site's contents do not duplicate anything publicly available in book form or on other web sites. Some national aircraft registers or helicopter production lists are published in books and on web sites, but in different formats.

The author reserves the right not to accept any liability, nor is he responsible for the content of external links. All Rotorspot registration data can be used freely (with due credit to www.rotorspot.nl), but strictly for non-commercial applications. Note that all pictures are copyrighted by the photographer and therefore can not be used without permission from the copyright owner.