When Napier man Hamish McLagan crashed his model Spitfire he was pretty distraught.
But from the skeleton of the wreck he decided to try something new, and ended up winning a global competition to build a radio-controlled aeroplane.
Inspired by the Red Bull Air Race, McLagan's effort, complete with a live video link from the cockpit, took him about 200 hours to build.
It landed him and wife Cherie an all-expenses trip to the United States, and VIP tickets to the Red Bull Air Race courtesy of Red Bull and the US-based Flite Test group.
"We watch those [Flite Test] guys on You Tube and they issued a challenge to do it, so I decided to give it a go," McLagan said.
While he had been flying radio-controlled aeroplanes for eight years, he had never built one himself, until the Spitfire crash.
"It was all scratch built from balsa, and I've never done that before and I had never used foam before, never cut foam before, whole lots of stuff I've never done before but I decided to go all in.
"Some of the parts were ordered online from hobby shops but some of them came out of a Spitfire I had.
"It was my absolute baby and I recently crashed that, so I ended up gutting some parts out of that."
The aircraft used a video receiver to display live camera footage to a set of virtual reality goggles being worn by the pilot.
Although his winning creation, a replica of a 1939 Howard Hughes H1, is still in the US being flown by the Flite Test team for a You Tube production, he still has other aircraft in Hawke's Bay so he can continue enjoying a hobby he developed a passion for many years ago.
"My grandfather took me along to the Awatoto club when I was just a wee fella, so that was the bug and I sort of really got into it flying them about eight years ago. I pretty much go flying all the time now."