About rotorspot.nl

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.

'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 database contains worldwide registration data for civil and military rotorcraft. The database includes information on registration (civil) or serial (military), rotorcraft type (the manufacturer of which is listed as the company that initially designed it), construction number, registration history (oldest to latest), and final fate. There is no owner/operator information in the database. The database is continuously updated with information from various sources. The database contains more than 180 000 civil rotorcraft registrations for more than 100 680 individual civil rotorcraft. The database also contains a growing number of military rotorcraft serials (currently more than 97 500 are included).

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 (civil and military). The main purpose of this website is to provide quick access to rotorcraft type, identity, registration and history. E.g. when one 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. 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. National aircraft registers or rotorcraft production lists that are published in books and on websites, are in different formats. The Rotorspot website uses 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 private initiatives that have no link 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.