John Darcy had never set foot on a plane until he was 40.
Now, 18 years and 179 flights later, he'll be on the first international flight to leave Western Sydney International Airport.
The Sydney aviation enthusiast spent his childhood photographing planes and dreaming of travelling on one. On Monday morning, he'll board Air New Zealand flight NZ166 to Auckland, becoming one of the first international passengers to depart from Australia's newest airport.
"I started keeping account of my flights; it's become a hobby, collecting airports, collecting flight routes, collecting different types of planes flown on," Darcy told SBS News.
"I've flown 179 times, more than 60 airports in Australia, North America and Europe.
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"But I needed to add Western Sydney International Airport to my tally."
Darcy is old enough to remember when the Hawke government announced Badgerys Creek as the site for Sydney's second airport.
After decades of debate, delay and construction, he said it felt only right to be there from the start.
"It's been so long coming. To think that on Sunday, passengers will start flying in and out of there, and on Monday I will be on the first international flight out of there."
"It's for the little boy inside of me."
Sydney's second airport will welcome its first passengers this weekend, becoming Australia's first newly built international airport in more than 50 years.
Located near Badgerys Creek in western Sydney, the airport will initially host services from airlines including Jetstar, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines, Fiji Airways, Qatar Airways and Vietjet.
Unlike Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport, flights can arrive and depart around the clock.
For aviation enthusiasts like Darcy, that makes the opening more than just an infrastructure project.
The destination, however, is almost beside the point.
Darcy will spend just one night in Auckland before flying home the following day.
"The only reason I'm doing this is for that inaugural flight," he said.
"I don't have any particular business in Auckland and I need to get back to resume work. I'm not taking holidays for this, just a couple of days off."
Four weeks later, he'll do something similar again, flying on Singapore Airlines' inaugural service from Western Sydney to Singapore.
"I'll be overnight in Auckland on Monday, but four weeks later when I go to Singapore, I'll be five hours in Changi Airport and then coming straight back."
"It's the novelty of the new airport and the badge of honour of being on the first international departure from that airport," he said.
There's also data behind that badge of honour.
Since 2014, he has logged every flight he can remember taking, tracking everything from flight numbers and aircraft types to which day of the week he travelled.
"It's on an Excel spreadsheet," he said.
"I've tracked all the data of the different flight sectors, the airlines, all the flight numbers, the length of all the flights, the departure airports, the arrival airports."
His trip from Western Sydney to Auckland has already been entered.
"It will be my 180th flight and 2,201 kilometres from Western Sydney to Auckland."
Darcy isn't the only aviation enthusiast making special plans for the airport's opening.
Some are buying tickets on inaugural flights. Others are heading to Sydney for a completely different view.
For 19-year-old Alastair, the opening of Western Sydney International Airport is just as exciting. But while Darcy will be inside the plane, Alastair plans to be hundreds of metres away with a camera pointed at it.
The Melbourne plane spotter is flying to Sydney specifically to photograph the airport's first departures.
"I'm going up there to capture a moment in history because it's not every day that Australia gets a new international airport," he said. "It'll just be a once-in-a-lifetime thing."
Plane spotting, he explains, is about more than watching aircraft take off and land.
"It's like getting different plane liveries that normal people would see and think, 'Oh, that's just what a plane looks like'," he said.
"Sometimes there's a really special one, and it's very cool to see."
After discovering the hobby at 14, Alastair began keeping a notebook of every aircraft registration he spotted.
Five years on, that handwritten tally is closing in on 2,000 entries, and he now heads out plane spotting almost every day.
Sometimes that's at Melbourne Airport. Sometimes it's from a nearby park. Occasionally, it's from his own backyard.
What started with a phone camera has evolved into a serious setup worth about $5,000.
He uses flight-tracking apps to monitor aircraft movements and, when he's photographing at Melbourne Airport, often climbs ladders to shoot above the fence line.
"What we bring at Melbourne Airport are ladders," he said. "We bring ladders that can go three metres up so we can get a good shot above the fence line."
Fully extended, those ladders can reach 6m.
He's never fallen off one himself, although he's seen others take a tumble in pursuit of the perfect image.
One of his favourite parts of the hobby is connecting with pilots, some of whom message him directly to ask for photos of their flights.
"They'll wave from the cockpit or they'll do something to acknowledge me from the other side of the fence," he said.
Within Australia's plane spotting community, the opening of Western Sydney International Airport has become one of the most anticipated aviation events in years.
Alastair compares the excitement to the arrival of the Airbus A350-1000 ULR in Melbourne earlier this year, when aviation enthusiasts gathered to photograph the aircraft used during Qantas' record-breaking ultra-long-haul testing flights.
"I don't think anything will beat the hype of when the Airbus A350-1000 ULR came to Melbourne," he said.
"But the hype for Western Sydney, it's big.
"Everyone's excited to spot there. Everyone's excited to fly out of there. Everyone's excited to see what airlines will fly there."
Like Darcy, Alastair is interested in the history as much as the aircraft itself.
He's already hoping to capture a photo of the airport's first departures, particularly if one receives a ceremonial water-cannon salute.
But he says the real value of those images won't be obvious to everyone who sees them.
"It's like the backstory of the photos," he said.
"Someone's going to say, 'Oh, that's just a Jetstar plane taking off.'
"And I'd be like, 'No, that's the first passenger flight out of a new airport in so long in Australia.'
"You can always get a Jetstar A320 at Western Sydney in the next 20 years.
"But you'll never forget the very first flight."
