Credits
Credits
- My greatest inspiration in this project is those who’ve already made a pass as distilling information about the helicopters that fly over DC:
- The wonderful people who contribute to and help maintain Wikipedia. Consider signing up for a modest monthly recurring donation if you haven’t already! It’ll support a great resource and let you gloss over those fundraising asks guilt-free from now on! :).
- Randall Munroe for inspiring the earnest enjoyment of neat things.
- Ben Balter for getting me and thousands of others onto GitHub and into open source. He’s a gracious and fun teacher, and I’m grateful for all he does. He also planted the seed for this project when he sent me this article 5-6 years ago.
- The technologists at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for all of their good work, which includes a bunch of great open source code. This website is based off of the Open Source Program Template that Bill Shelton and his teammates worked on. They are a model for all of government.
Disclaimers
- This website is inspired by and entirely made possible by the really neat and generous work of websites like Foxtrot Alpha and folks like u/celocanth13, as well as several other generous folks that I’ve outlined in the credits.
- I’m sure I’ve got some errors on this website and that they are of my own doing. Please let me know if you see anything wrong by filing an issue and I’ll try to correct it asap. :)
- I’m aiming for both beginner and expert audiences here, but I’m sure I’ll often miss that sweet spot. Thanks for putting up with the attempted balance.
- For practical purposes, I’m keeping the focus of this site on DC proper. There’s a good number of really neat VA and MD helicopters as well and sometimes the line blurs but for now, I’m going to try and keep focused on only those that end up flying in DC itself.
- A reasonable person may ask if it’s irresponsible to bring more attention to some of this information. I’ve gone back and forth on the matter before but subscribe to the criteria articulated in a 2005 Federal Geographic Data Committee - Homeland Security Working Group presentation on this topic. It’s a great talk and I recommend it for your consideration.