This is where my passion for helicopters started - My first model helicopter - my sister Gillian on the left, me blowing up a balloon, my brother James and my neighbour Brian Mattei. My brother James and I made ours from scratch using a coping saw and scrap wood, such was our keen-ness to match Brian Mattei's plastic one. (Throughout primary and secondary school, we had virtually no pocket money and we did everything on a shoe string, complete to a coathanger wire in a wooden cotton reel on the kitchen gas stove for our soldering iron to make our first electronics gizmos, and a putt-putt boat from a Strepsils tin.) Our family's habit was incredible creativity on less than a shoe string. (So utterly different from the consumer society of today, and we did have more fun.)