"Only birds and fools fly," Bill Pople says with a wry smile, and he would know.

In an aviation engineering career that has spanned 75 years, he has retrieved or repaired about 480 crashed planes across Australia.

He turned 95 on Friday after voluntarily retiring from casual work just 18 months ago, making him potentially Australia's longest-serving aviation engineer.

"98 per cent of those [crashes] were pilot error; that's what I put it down to," Bill said.

"There's nothing wrong with aeroplanes. They're as safe as the pilot."

Retrieving planes from across Australia

Bill's aviation career started after he joined the Royal Australian Airforce (RAAF) in 1942 during World War II.

He then left the RAAF in 1960 to work for a variety of aviation companies and organisations in senior engineering roles.

Bill and his team work to retrieve a light aeroplane from Lake Eyre in SA's north. ( Supplied: Bill Pople )

Throughout this time, Bill also clocked up over 1.25 million miles on his 1974 Ford F100 ute as he retrieved, recovered or maintained aircraft from all corners of Australia, from Broome to Cairns, and the Northern Territory.

He had to use boats, canoes and even hovercrafts on occasion, such as when he recovered an aircraft from shallow water in Lake Eyre.

"It was a sight-seeing plane and that pilot happened to say to the passengers, 'Have you ever flown below sea level before?'" Bill said.

"And as he said that, he hit the water and just skimmed.

"They all got out of it; it was in two feet of water.

"We recovered it though and got it out alright."

Bill has arrived at many crashed planes in his time. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

He recalled another crashed aircraft at Bunda in the Northern Territory.

"This chap, he took off and was flying along merrily, he reckons, and he went to sleep," Bill said.

"When he woke up he was upside down on the ground, hanging by his seatbelt and the motor was missing.

"How lucky is that?"

Born in the Adelaide Hills

Bill was born in 1923 at Lobethal in the Adelaide Hills, called Tweedvale at the time due to a State Government decision to change the German place names in WWI.

His family moved to Adelaide's northern suburbs near Parafield Airport when he turned seven, where he became interested in aeroplanes.

He joined a model aeroplane club and started making sail planes and Tiger Moths in the 1930s.

In 1937 on the same day he finished school, Bill rode his bicycle to Adelaide and landed a job as an electrician's offsider at Wiles Chromium and Electro-plating Company on Waymouth Street.

He joined the RAAF in 1942, left for England, and also spent some time in Borneo during World War II.

Bill started building model aeroplanes before he became an aircraft engineer in WWII. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

After the war, Bill continued with the RAAF for a further 18 years, with his final postings at Mallala and Woomera.

"I went to England in 1954 to get a [Supermarine] Swift, a fighter plane that had just come out," he said.

"We wanted to drop missiles from it."

He recalled the difficulties his team had with some of the British service people they worked with.

"The Poms tried to put everything over you," Bill said.

"They wouldn't close hanger doors unless you really got onto them, and sometimes if they saw you coming one way, they'd go the other.

"They'd try to dictate to you how they should be working and what they should be doing.

"Anyway, we put up with them."

Bill also recalled how it took his crew 54 hours to fly to England in a Handley Page Hastings troop-carrier and another 54 to fly back, flying up to nine hours a day before resting overnight.

"Coming home, we bought some train sets and, because we had an empty plane, we put them around the plane and played with them, just to pass the time away."

Bill carefully documented most of his adventures retrieving crashed or broken down aeroplanes across Australia. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

Life after the RAAF

After leaving the RAAF in 1960, Bill worked at AV Roe on the Blue Steel missile project to equip Britain's "V bombers" — the Valiant, Vulcan and Victor aeroplanes.

"The day I finished there I went to Parafield and the Royal Aero Club and got a job there and I was there for the next 18 years," Bill said.

From about 1978 he worked for Robby's Aerial Service (aerial agriculture) followed by Southern Aircraft Maintenance and John White Avionics.

He joined Gulfstream Aviation at Parafield as a casual in 2007 and finally retired last year.

"They didn't sack me. They just asked me to think about a day to retire," Bill said.

Gulfstream Aviation chief executive Wayne Grant described Bill as a colourful character who had "probably forgotten more than most of my guys know".

"He's never short of a word," he said.

He said there were areas in maintenance that Bill could not work due to practical reasons with regard to his age, but considered the long-time engineer "good value".

"I think his longevity is due to the fact he kept working," Wayne said.

Bill Pople always had his ute and two trailers ready at hand to retrieve crashed planes. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

A love for the open road and adventure

Throughout his years as engineer, it was his work recovering aeroplanes from across Australia that Bill enjoyed the most, often taking him away from his day job for days on end.

He would often be called by his employer, an insurance assessor, who would ring him at any hour of the day or night to leave his wife and three children at home and travel to the site of a crashed aircraft.

Bill said he would always have his ute full of petrol and his two trailers ready to go.

"Once he rang me to go and get an aeroplane from outside of Darwin, and I left and after a while he rang my missus up to say, 'Tell Bill not to go because wouldn't get there because of the rain'," he said.

Some of the more difficult recoveries required airlift through helicopters. ( ABC Radio Adelaide: Malcolm Sutton )

"I didn't have a telephone and she'd say, 'He's already gone'.

"Three times I tried to go up and get that aeroplane. We went all that way and couldn't get through because of the water.

"On the last time I got a mate up there to ring me first.

"Even the police rang up to say we could go on one trip."

Celebrating his 95th birthday

Bill said he would celebrate his 95th birthday on Friday with his family.

"If anyone's had a better life than me, they must have had a good one."

As for the aeroplanes that have filled that life, Bill remained grounded.

"They've changed considerably in style rather than the way they get around in turbines and all that," he said.

"But I've never gone into the computers. I just worked on aircraft."