About ...

I graduated as aeronautical engineer from Delft University. For most of my working life I have been employed at the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (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 teaching drone operators, etc. My hobby started as 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 building a civil rotorcraft registrations database. At first just for The Netherlands, then also for Belgium and Luxembourg, and the rest of Europe. Soon this evolved into a worldwide database.

The Rotorspot database contains worldwide registration data for civil (and to a lesser extent for military) rotorcraft. This includes information on registration, rotorcraft type, construction number, registration history, and final fate. There is no owner/user/operator information in the database and data are strictly used for non-commercial purposes. The database is continuously updated with information from various sources. Currently the database contains more than 165 190 civil rotorcraft registrations for more than 93 420 individual rotorcraft. Over the years the database has been growing with an average annual increase of about 5350 civil rotorcraft registrations and about 3000 individual rotorcraft.

The Rotorspot website publishes data extracted from the database. On this website one can find current (active) and historical (complete) civil rotorcraft registers for every country in the world, complete production lists for a growing range of rotorcraft types, and, last but not least, a searchable rotorcraft database. The main purpose of this website is to provide quick access to rotorcraft type, identity, registration and history. E.g. when you have a registration and are looking for the correct type or identity, the website will provide it. Based on that first step, one then can make further research using other, more elaborate sources. As far as I am aware, this website's contents do not duplicate anything publicly available in book form or on other websites. Some national aircraft registers or rotorcraft production lists are published in books and on websites, but in different formats. The first release of the Rotorspot website was on September 1st, 1999. Over the years the website has been hosted by several free hosting providers. When the free service was ended, it was time to start a dedicated domain at www.rotorspot.nl. Then also the opportunity was taken to do a major revamp of the website, giving it a more up-to-date look. In 2013 a change to PHP coding was introduced, that allows automatic extraction of web pages from a MySQL database. The Rotorspot website requires JavaScript and has been tested for proper displaying in various browsers, like Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. All CSS, HTML and PHP code on the website has been validated for standards compliance using appropriate tools. Although this guarantees a website without coding format errors, 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.

The Rotorspot database and website are a private initiative and have no links with commercial organisations. Rotorspot.nl reserves the right not to accept any liability, nor to be 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 respective photographers and therefore can not be used without permission from the copyright owner.