WITH thousands of hours in his pilot's log book, self-taught artist Pete Williams produces brilliant aviation pictures.

Now aged 55, a heart murmer picked up during a flying medical robbed him of his long-held job as a flying instructor.

A job as a trainee manager with a supermarket followed before he was offered a job at Thruxton - the airfield where he first qualified in the air - re-fuelling aircraft. Without a backward glance, he accepted.

The commissioned aviation pictures - as well as portraits of pets - have necessarily become more important. Pete's ability as an artist has been pursued just as vigorously as his wish to fly.

Disarmingly, he reveals that as a builder's son from Frome, where he still lives, he had no scholarship qualifications and fully thought a Bob the Builder's life would be his in the family firm.

But he wanted to fly, saved all his spare cash and signed on at Thruxton's then well-known Wiltshire School of Flying. He learnt on a Thruxton Jackaroo, a four- seater conversion of the two-seater Tiger Moth and brainchild of the school's boss, Sq Ldr Doran Webb.

A painting of a Jackaroo, one of his first, now hangs in the aptly named Jackaroo Restaurant at the local airfield, home to Western Air Training.

It was one of Pete students in 1978 who was responsible for him starting to reproduce his beloved planes on canvas.

Pete showed the would-be pilot a pencil drawing of the Tiger Moth he was learning to fly. "He said: 'How much?' I said '£50', he said 'Done' and that was it," Pete remembers.

His portfolio contains all types of aircraft, in the same manner as his flying logbook. But with the latter his one ambition is to add a Dakota DC3.