Peregrinations and other stuff 5 This user has set foot in 5 continents of the world. 29 This user has visited 29 of the 208 countries in the world. This user comes from Australia. 2018 2006 2011 2018 2014 2006 1990 1991 2006 2002 2006 2017 2018 1990 2006 2018 2006 2006 2008 2012 2013 2016 2018 2018 2019 2018 2006 2019 2000 2003 2015 2015 2017 2018 2018 2019 2006 2010 2013 2016 2002 2010 2018 2002 2006 2002 2014 1990 2002 2006 2010 2017 2002 2002 2006 2007 2008 2015 2017 2020 2009 2018

This user has visited 8 of the various States and territories of Australia. 8 ACT NSW NT QLD SA TAS VIC WA This user has visited 14 of the 50 United States. 14 AL AZ AR CA FL HI KS KY MO NE OH OK TN TX

This user is owned by one or more dogs. This user likes penguins. This user is a Douglas DC-3 fan. This user is a fan of the P-47 Thunderbolt. This user has flown above the speed of smell in a piece of crap cargo aircraft This user has stood on the top of Yding Skovhøj and Ejer Bavnehøj, at the time thought to be the two highest points of Denmark. This user has been to the site of Ravensbrück concentration camp, near Berlin in Germany. This user has seen the island of Surtsey, which didn't exist until 1963, in Iceland. This user has seen Komodo dragons on the islands of Rinca and Komodo and visited Borobodur, in Indonesia. This user has watched brave small children climb to the tops of castells during La Mercè in Barcelona, Spain. This user has dined at At.mosphere, the restaurant on Level 122 of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. This user has stood next to the marker denoting the geographic center of the 'lower 48' states of the United States of America. This user has stood on the crater rim of Yasur as it erupted, on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu.

This user is one of the the top 3000 most active English Wikipedians of all time. This editor is a Senior Editor III and is entitled to display this Rhodium Editor Star. This user has written or expanded 1 article featured in the Did You Know section on the Main Page. This user page has been vandalized 9 times.

I am an Australian aviation enthusiast who also works within the aviation industry - at Sydney Airport when I first joined the Wikipedia community (hence my user name, the International Civil Aviation Organization airport identification code for Sydney Airport is YSSY) - in the field of aircraft maintenance.

Possibly the best edit summary I have seen[edit]

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Bushranger

Also possibly the best edit summary I have seen[edit]

Now I'm conflicted. The work of BilCat everyone [thunderous applause]

With a tug of the forelock to Whitney Houston...[edit]

*sings* "...and Ooooff is the direction I'd like yooouuu to Fuuuuck"

Sockpuppet investigation[edit]

I thought I'd seen it all on Wikipedia; then I saw this breathtaking edit. Methinks s/he doth protest too much.

A couple of weeks later, we have this "new" User, whose very first edit serves to announce - among other things - that s/he is not a sockpuppet of ModernFire. Kind of takes the fun out of running an SPI.

Best. Unblock. Request. Ever[edit]

"You should unblock me because blocking me is a violation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights". Wow...

Does anyone actually read the articles?[edit]

So, on 30 December 2008 Aditya Kabir added some text to the Bikini article, that included the phrase 'made by Mappin and Webb of London in the 1977'. On 14 January 2009, Aditya Kabir did a cut-and-paste job to move text to the Bikini variants article (in only the third edit to that article), including the phrase 'in the 1977'. That phrase remained in the article until I edited it on 25 June 2019 —- a bit under ten-and-a-half years between the mistake being made and somebody fixing it.

I'm not having a go about the mistake, I have typed 'the the' plenty of times when not explicitly referring to the eponymous band. I wonder how many people have read that phrase 'in the 1977' and done nothing about it, or read that without noticing it.

Barnstars[edit]

		The Citation Barnstar
		For finding great refs for the Cessna 180 article to replace some pretty old fact tags - Ahunt (talk) 02:30, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

		Wikiwings
		For extraordinary contributions to Aircraft in fiction, thus improving hundreds of aircraft type articles along the way! - Ahunt (talk) 15:19, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

	The Editor's Barnstar
	Thank you for the great editing for many aviation articles especially the Fokker F27 Friendship article! Jacsam2 (talk) 22:46, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

	The Special Barnstar
	I am very pleased to award you the Special Barnstar for your extraordinary work behind the scenes. I thank you so much for keeping a watch on articles that do not meet Wikipedia's guidelines, and nominate them for deletion as a result. Cheers! Sp33dyphil "Ad astra" 06:53, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

	The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
	I like your style WP:BOLD when dealing with articles on minor aviation crashes. ...William 19:03, 2 May 2012 (UTC)

		Wikiwings
		Awarded for great work expanding the Piper Aircraft article. - Ahunt (talk) 14:45, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

	The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
	For your hard work on aviation related articles. ...William 14:16, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

	First class meal for you
	Thank you for cleaning up the fleet and destination tables for airline articles. — Sunnya343✈ (háblame • my work) 18:01, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

	The Copyeditor's Barnstar
	Nice work cleaning up Canada–United States border and many other articles. Magnolia677 (talk) 14:16, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Articles[edit]

Articles created[edit]

I have created thirty articles so far, seventeen dealing with aspects of the Australian aviation industry:

Significant contributions[edit]

Some (but not all) of the articles dealing with aspects of Australian aviation that I have edited were almost non-existent as far as content was concerned. While not creating them, I consider that I have made a very large contribution to these articles:

Edits[edit]

In the first year-or-so after registering an account in July 2007, my editing tended to be of the "one-massive-edit" school (for example this expansion of the de Havilland Australia article and this edit to the Ryan ST article) rather than the "make-lots-of-small edits" variety but nowadays I don't have the time to spend several hours working on one article. As a result of having less time to spend, I now usually make small edits to articles, often to fix typographical errors and spelling mistakes; as of February 2015, about 3,200 of my 17,000 edits have been such edits, including changing "aircrafts" to "aircraft" more than 600 times.

I also find that I make a lot of edits when curiosity dictates that I follow the wikilinks to wherever they go; for example I made this edit then clicked on a wikilink in the article, which led to this edit, then on to another linked article and these edits, then another article and another edit - and lo and behold: more than two hours passes by. To give another example, while searching for instances of "a Australian" to correct, I came across this article about Haig Sare, whom I had never heard of and which didn't contain "a Australian", but which I could see needed work, so I made this edit; I then clicked on a link in the article to search for an appropriate Category to add, which led me to the article about Sare's old school (Sydney Church of England Grammar School) and to make this edit. After clicking on the link in the Hatnote I had created, I made this edit to the List of Old Boys of Shore, then added Haig Sare to the list in another edit. After saving that edit I noticed a formatting issue that I fixed with this edit, then arrived at the bottom of the page, where I found the Category People educated at Sydney Church of England Grammar School, which I then added to the Haig Sare article. That, in a nutshell, is how I end up editing lots of articles a small number of times.

My initial "big-change" edit style and my more recent "edit-and-move-on" style have resulted in an overall average of about two edits per page; however having said that, as of the end of December 2016 I have edited one-hundred-and-one articles more than twenty times each. This includes fifty-eight articles edited more than forty times each, of which nine I edited a-hundred-or-more times, including: 360 edits to the Qantas article; 210 edits to the LaMia Flight 2933 article (in barely more than a month); 180 edits to the Virgin Australia article; and 330 edits - mostly small fixes and copyedits - to the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 article (including 170 edits in the first week-and-a-half following the aircraft's disappearance). My "Top Ten" articles-by-number-of-edits account for more than 1,800 of my 26,500 edits made. January 2015 was the first time I managed to make more than a thousand edits in a month; I also made more than a thousand edits in October 2016 and more than 990 in December the same year. Conversely, there have been two periods of six months during which I made no edits at all; and another six-month period during which I made less than a hundred edits.

• 4,000th edit was to the PacificFlier article on 10 June 2010; the article was deleted in August 2016
• 5,000th edit was to add an image to the Pratt & Whitney R-2000 article on 29 March 2011.
• 6,000th edit was this version of the RotorSport UK Calidus article, on 2 August 2011.
• 7,000th edit was this version of the No. 3 Squadron RAAF article, on 27 October 2011.
• 8,000th edit was this version of the Yogyakarta article, on 19 July 2012, coincidently the fifth anniversary of my creating a Wkipedia User account (although I had edited as an IP for some time prior to that).
• 9,000th edit was this version of the Kremenchuk flight college of National Aviation University article, on 13 November 2012
• 10,000th edit was this version of the Environmental protection article, on 27 May 2013
• 11,000th edit was this version of the Hong Kong International Airport article, on 2 July 2013
• 12,000th edit was this version of the Garrett TPE331 article, on 3 December 2013
• 13,000th edit was to add an image to the Tigerair Australia article on 26 February 2014
• 14,000th edit was this version of the Sophia Magdalena of Denmark article, on 18 March 2014
• 15,000th edit was this version of the Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 450 article, on 12 May 2014
• 16,000th edit was this version of the Fiji Airways article, on 20 January 2015
• 17,000th edit was this version of the Kelly Hoppen article, on 4 February 2015
• 18,000th edit was this version of the Skytrans Airlines article, on 27 March 2015
• 19,000th edit was this version of the Mustafa Yılmaz article, on 17 May 2015
• 20,000th edit was this version of the Trigana Air Service Flight 257 article, on 18 August 2015
• 21,000th edit was this version of the East Star Airlines article, on 12 April 2016
• 22,000th edit was this version of the Indian Air Force article, on 20 May 2016
• 23,000th edit was this version of the List of aircraft of the Swiss Air Force, on 8 August 2016
• 24,000th edit was this version of the Air New Zealand article, on 15 October 2016
• 25,000th edit was this version of the Virgin America destinations list, on 13 November 2016
• 26,000th edit was this version of the Interjet article, on 17 December 2016
• 27,000th edit was this version of the United Airlines Flight 175 article, on 24 January 2017
• 28,000th edit was this version of the 2016 Indonesian Police PZL M28 Skytruck crash article, on 16 June 2017
• "Tenth Anniversary" edit since registering an account was the 28,292nd edit made, this version of the Gujarat Beechcraft incident article, on 19 July 2017
• 29,000th edit was this version of the Sunna (band) article, on 17 December 2017 - the 114th anniversary of the first successful flights by the Wright brothers in the Wright Flyer and the 82nd anniversary of the first flight of the Douglas DC-3
• 30,000th edit was this version of the Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 article, on 22 April 2018
• 31,000th edit was this version of the Fulda article, on 7 November 2018
• 32,000th edit was a !vote on an Articles for Deletion discussion page, on 19 March 2019
• 33,000th edit was this version of the Ralf Little article, on 17 December 2020 - the 117th anniversary of the first successful flights by the Wright brothers in the Wright Flyer and the 85th anniversary of the first flight of the Douglas DC-3

Aircraft, airlines and journeys[edit]

Aircraft types I have worked on during my career[edit]

Aircraft in which I have flown[edit]

Airlines and journeys[edit]

My images[edit]

I have been taking photographs of aircraft for almost 30 years and have a reasonably large collection (believe me when I say there are people out there with much bigger collections than mine); I estimate that it is about 30,000 photos, of which about two thirds are digital images - the rest were taken on colour film. I still prefer film, but I have to admit that digital images are easier to work with; I sometimes take a photo of an aircraft with my film camera then take a digital photo as well. The images I have uploaded for use in articles are below.

Unedited images[edit]

None of these images have been treated or altered in any way:

Edited images[edit]

These images have been have been edited using Picasa software:

Converted images[edit]

These images are digital versions of photos taken with a 35mm film SLR camera:

Other images[edit]

Images other than those showing complete aircraft that I have uploaded to illustrate articles:

Deleted images[edit]

My videos[edit]

• A bucket thrust reverser being deployed

Frequently Used Sources and External Links[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Frawley, Gerald. The International Directory of Civil Aircraft 1997/98. Aerospace Publications, Fyshwick ACT 1997. ISBN 1 875671 26 9
• Jane's Fighting Aircraft of World War II, Bracken Books, London, 1989. ISBN 1 85170 199 0
• Phillips, Edward H. Beechcraft - Pursuit of Perfection, A History of Beechcraft Airplanes. Flying Books, Eagan, Minnesota 1992. ISBN 0-911139-11-7
• Taylor, M. J. H. ed. Jane's Encyclopedia of Aviation Studio Editions Ltd., London, 1989. ISBN 1 85170 324 1

External links[edit]

• Australian Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• Belgian Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• Canadian Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine (Current registrations)
• Canadian Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine (Historic registrations)
• Danish Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• Dutch Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• French Civil Aircraft Register
• Icelandic Civil Aircraft Register
• Indian Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• Irish Civil Aircraft Register
• New Zealand Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• Papua New Guinea Civil Aircraft Register via https://casapng.gov.pg/airworthiness/airworthiness-registers/
• South African Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine (User login required)
• UK Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• FAA US Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• Landings.com US Civil Aircraft Register Search Engine
• US Military aircraft lists

• Aerofiles.com
• Airbus Orders and Deliveries
• Airliners.net photo library Search Engine
• Aviation Safety Network aircraft accident & incident database
• BCair 2009 Planning & Purchasing Handbook
• Flight International online archive
• Flight International 2009 World Airliner Census
• Flight International 2010 World Airliner Census
• Flight International 2011 World Airliner Census
• Flight International 2015 World Airliner Census
• Flight International 1971 World's Air Forces
• IATA Code search
• LAASdata.com Bizjet Production Lists
• LAASdata.com Bizprop Production Lists
• Scramble.nl Military Databases
• UK aircraft Type Certificates
• US aircraft Type Certificates
• Old US aircraft Type Certificate information
• US aircraft Supplemental Type Certificates

Wikipedia templates[edit]

• {{ASN accident|title= |id= |accessdate= }} (id is number only, not full URL) (displays as Accident description for [title])
• {{sic|nolink=y|"text"}}
• {{multiple image | align = right | direction = vertical | width = 200 | image1 = | width1 = | alt1 = | caption1 = | image2 = | width2 = | alt2 = | caption2 = | image3 = | width3 = | alt3 = | caption3 = | image4 = | width4 = | alt4 = | caption4 = | image5 = | width5 = | alt5 = | caption5 = | header = | header_align = center | header_background = | footer = | footer_align = <!-- left/right/center --> | footer_background = | background color = }}
• <ref group="Note"> and {{reflist|group=Note}}
• {{efn|"Text"}} and {{notelist}} (use with multiple notes)
• <ref>Airbus Orders and Deliveries (XLS), accessed via {{cite web |url=http://www.aircraft.airbus.com/market/orders-deliveries/ |title=Orders and Deliveries |publisher=Airbus |date= 2018 |access-date= 2018 }}</ref>