About ...

I graduated as aeronautical engineer from Delft University in Sep-1982. From Feb-1985 until my retirement in Jul-2021 I was employed at the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) in Amsterdam, working on rotorcraft related topics. Activities ranged from flight performance to flying qualities, from 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. Once the decision was made to concentrate on 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 the worldwide Rotorspot database.

The Rotorspot database contains worldwide registration data for civil and (to a lesser extent) for military rotorcraft. The database includes information on registration, rotorcraft type (manufacturer listed as the company that designed it), construction number, registration history (oldest to latest), and final fate. There is no owner/operator information in the database, and data are strictly used for non-commercial purposes. The database is continuously updated with information from various sources. The database contains more than 177 350 civil rotorcraft registrations for more than 99 580 individual civil rotorcraft. Over the years the database has been growing with an annual increase of about 4800 rotorcraft registrations and about 2600 individual rotorcraft. The database also contains a growing number of military rotorcraft and their serials/registrations.

Rotorcraft definition

'Rotorcraft' to this respect means "a heavier-than-air aircraft that depends principally for its support in flight on the lift generated by one or more rotors" (EASA aircraft classification). Therefore, the Rotorspot database and website exclude all aircraft types with lifting propellers. Furthermore, unmanned rotorcraft below 150 kg are excluded (EASA's initial regulatory framework used this mass value as a lower limit for unmanned aircraft being subject to EU regulation).

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 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. The first release of the Rotorspot website was in 1999, and the switch to www.rotorspot.nl was made in 2009. From the best of my knowledge, 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 Rotorspot website requires JavaScript and has been tested for proper displaying in various browsers. All CSS, HTML and PHP coding 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. If you do encounter problems of any kind, feel free to inform me and the issue will be corrected 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 photographs are copyrighted by the respective photographers and therefore can not be used without permission from said copyright owner.