IT has been ten years in the making, put together by Louis Rex and his son John in a back garden.

Now the sky is the limit for the engineers after they finished building the light aircraft.

“This is a lifetime’s dream fulfilled for me,” said Louis, 66, who lives in Eggborough, near Selby.

He said the plane – a Jodel D140 Mousquetaire – was the first privately built four-seater aircraft in the UK.

John, 39, said the challenge had tested their carpentry skills.

He said: “Some of the bits [of wood] were steamed and bent which is a sort of dying out art.

“You’re actually steaming the wood to bend it. All the wing parts have to be steamed so we made a little steam oven to do that.” Louis, who used to live in Pickering and later York, said he was delighted the Jodel, which cost about £28,500 to assemble, had been completed after a decade of work.

He said: “I have a saying: ‘Follow your dreams’. If you want it badly enough, you can do it. And you don’t have to be an engineer to build them. Obviously certain parts you do but the parts that you can’t you can always get other people, I would have thought, to do them.

Louis, who constructed the French plane in a portable building in his back garden, hopes to fly the plane all over the UK and would also like to pilot it to France and Spain.

He hopes to be piloting the aircraft by mid-October.

Asked why they chose to produce that particular aircraft, Louis said it “ticked all the boxes” for them.

He said: “I could make it out of wood and aluminium. I could work with those materials. I could service it. “Being engineers, we could make our own bits, like the undercarriage. It all fitted the bill.”

John, who lives near Rotherham, said: “It’s been a long project. I’ve not seen it fly yet and not been up in it yet.

It’s going through its test programme and then hopefully we’ll get a permit to fly.”

Louis was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1966 for engineering modifications he made to earth-moving equipment while serving in the army.

Before retiring, he worked for Keller Ground Engineering, based at Thorp Arch Trading Estate, near Wetherby and is now employed at John’s business, John Rex Model Engineers, in Pontefract, where father and son make miniature steam engines. Louis said the aircraft was designed by a Frenchman called Delamontez for the country’s air force, which used it to instruct pilots and for navigational training.

“It was also used in the Algerian war,” he said. “They were used to stretcher people out of casualty areas.”