A high-flying banker with a pilot's licence wows the crowd at air shows - but he keeps his feet firmly on the ground.

Steve Thomas, of Oxenhope, uses his squadron of scale model aircraft to achieve death-defying feats.

They are one-quarter and one-third size scale models, which the 42-year-old flies at displays and air shows the length and breadth of the country.

The banker has also featured in modelling magazines - and his aircraft ( a Lancaster bomber is pictured here) can even be seen on the silver screen, including a memorable role for one of his numerous Second World World fighter planes, a P51 Mustang, in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster Empire of the Sun.

Steve, who lives with his wife, Julie, and their two sons, Brynley, aged 11, and Iwan, six, described how his obsession began.

"I first became interested in aircraft through an uncle who was in the RAF," he said. "I started putting little balsa wood models together and now I have been doing it for 30 years or more."

Today his collection has grown to around 30 aircraft.

Each plane can take up to five years to build and the cost can run into thousands of pounds.

He added: "Kits only go up to a certain size and so over the years I have learned how to weld and how to work with wood and fibreglass."

The workshop beneath his house is jammed full of wings, fuselages and a mountain of other aircraft parts.

Among his collection there are stunt planes, including a biplane that belches smoke trails for its aerobatic displays, and others such as the Chipmunk trainer.

But Steve's real passion is for the various War Birds he has built, including the formidable Focke Wulf F190, which terrorised the skies over Britain in the early 1940s, the deadly North American P51 Mustang and the feared Japanese Mitsubishi A6M, better known as the Zero.

Powered by chainsaw engines, some of these aircraft are capable of reaching speeds of 300mph.

Many model planes are exact replicas of aircraft that actually existed, even down to the registration number painted on the side.

And on more than one occasion Steve's path has met the pilots who actually flew them, including some remarkable encounters with war veterans.

He said: "I had been doing a show with a Mustang and a Polish man called Gabini came up to me. It turned out that he was a World War Two fighter pilot and the plane that I had been using for the display was the one that he had flown during the war."

Already stringent regulations surrounding the larger model aircraft have tightened even further in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The aircraft are inspected by officers from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the pilot must demonstrate his ability at the controls.