About ...

I graduated as aeronautical engineer at the Delft University. For most of my working life I have been employed at the 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 being 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 Luxemburg, and next for Europe. Soon this evolved into a worldwide database.

The Rotorspot database contains registration data for civil (and to a lesser extent for military) 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 data are strictly used for non-commercial purposes. The database is continuously kept up-to-date with new information. Currently the database contains more than 156 180 civil rotorcraft registrations for more than 89 500 individual rotorcraft. Over the years the database has been growing with an average annual increase of about 5450 civil rotorcraft registrations and about 3050 individual rotorcraft.

The Rotorspot website publishes data extracted from the database. On this website one can find complete (historical) and active (current) civil rotorcraft registers for every country in the world. More and more complete rotorcraft production lists are being added. And, last but not least, a searchable rotorcraft database is available. 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 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 helicopter production lists are published in books and on websites, but in different formats. The first release ever of my website was on September 1st, 1999. Over the years the website has been hosted by several free hosting providers. When the previous provider ended their free service, it was time to start my own domain at www.rotorspot.nl. Then I also took the opportunity to do a major revamp of the website, giving it a more up-to-date look. In 2013 a change to PHP-files was introduced, that allows automatic extraction of (most of the) web pages from a MySQL database. All CSS, HTML and PHP code on this website has been validated for standards compliance using appropriate tools. Although this guarantees an error-free website, 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.