David becomes Goliath

Conservatively that pegs LFG's wealth at a very respectable Lowy has the slightly fervent air of a workaholic. He supports the theory. "Either I'm asleep or I'm doing something," he admits.

of four. In the entrance of LFG Investments' office in Westfield Towers - in Sydney's William Street, not far from that gig venue in the Cross - staff and visitors are faced with a reprinted, enlarged visiting - a daily mantra, if you like.
band.

School. "The discipline at Grammar was a bit much for me," he confesses. So he convinced his parents to allow him to move to a high school in Vaucluse.

realised he would have to repeat a year.
Lowy says his father, whom he dotes on, told him in no uncertain Grammar."
Clearly he responded better a second time around.

He studied commerce at the University of NSW, where his brothers, whom he says "are equal or smarter", are also alumni.
He then moved to the US, where he worked in Westfield's business during its start-up phase. Four years later, in 1985, he began to fly.

"I actually wanted to join the air force," Lowy says. "Once I did it [flying], I did it with a vengeance.
"My mother is responsible.

She bought me this balsawood glider." time in Dover Heights. "You'd get updrafts coming up the cliffs," he says gleefully.

A year after getting his pilot's licence, at the age of 31, Lowy was appointed group operations director, and a year later managing director.
He continued his passion for flying, branching into aerobatics. Eventually, after being kicked out of aerodromes all over the state because of the noise, Lowy and his flying mates, the Sydney accountant Tom Moon and the now jailed businessman Steve Hart, "We never thought we'd get a David Lowy to land in our lap," says Temora's Mayor, Peter Spiers.

Thanks to Lowy, Temora is now home to a national air museum, with a budget to make most city museums swoon with envy. "It's enormous what he's done," says Moon. "It's respected worldwide as one of the best war aviation museums in the world.

" Lisa Love, wanted."
gathering dust."
member, and former Herald journalist, John Sharpe, says: It's not just his toy, his private thing.

"
Nikitiuk - as trainers. Moon and Lowy lived together in the house next to the Temora airfield while, unusually, training together and critiquing each other, the next moment competing against each other.
Lowy enjoys his creature comforts, according to his best friend, property developer Phillip Wolanski.

On an overseas tour in their 20s, they had a budget of $20 a day and even kept a ledger. In the bathroom with other guests. "I think it's the last time he's Wolanski jokes.

LOWY is sometimes described as aloof. "He's very shy," Moon says. "I think that's why they [people] don't think he's personable.

"
Wolanski concurs: "I think he's a very, very unusual person. He's got great complexity and diversity and great strength."
very, very clever and very, very intelligent.

He's got a good sense of efficacy and a good sense of morality."
Lowy won the highest honour in Australian aerobatic flying, a first place in the "unlimited" division in 1998.
"He could have gone to the world championships," says Sharpe.

"A and his first duty was always to the company. Like I say, he's a Lowy is matter-of-fact about his decision not to compete. "I was available.

"
international competition.
"A lot of people associate it [flying] with freedom," Lowy says. "It's anything but that.

It's a rigorous discipline." He emphasises: "This is not a leisure pursuit."
"He's always been very cautious," Sharpe says.

"He's kind of the opposite to what you imagine an aerobatic pilot to be, apart from looking like Cruise in Top Gun , of course."
tense than some people. I think it hampered him in competition, but when he conquered it he won.

"
work. He recalls a national competition in January one year, rather than the traditional Easter event. "In January he had very little pressure best I ever saw him flying," Moon says.

write, come to mind: "Pressure, pressure, gives you a bad reaction, every time the world gets smaller, you need a new relaxant."
business is important. "He pointed out the pluses and minuses," he says.

"[LFG] started off as an opportunistic investment company. We upside." There is a listed equities fund.

"We're very opportunistic. We haven't held more than seven stocks."
manager, PM Capital, and an Israeli funds management business.

"I always looked up to him [Dad] so much. I liked the idea of business - of making good profit."
Says a fellow pilot, who didn't wish to be named, "I think the family thought it was a complete lunatic game, this flying all the time.

"
doesn't like it either," Lowy admits.
his plane just before rolling, so it has an upward trajectory. With a barely visible shudder, he acknowledges that "the longer you do it, the more you realise you didn't know at the beginning".

Fifteen years on from his first flying lesson, Lowy had another lusting.
acoustic guitar. Again, he blames his mother, a pianist, who played background.

When he was 10 or 11 he began piano lessons. "I didn't really enjoy it. I gave it away.

" At the age of 15 he was in a A partnership begun in 2003 with the former Angels' front man, Doc Neeson, was short-lived. Lowy wrote the music for songs for got 12 weeks' airplay - while Neeson wrote the lyrics.
However, the move encouraged Lowy to continue playing music - in spite of his self-acknowledged amateurism.

He takes it seriously half his age and to have switched to blonder, shaggier locks.
Frank Lowy's greatest achievements, says one observer, are his sons. When Packer asked Lowy to become a non-executive director of brothers.

Any one of the four, says Lowy, has right of veto.
"It's not to say we don't disagree with each other, we're not supermen," says Lowy. But, "we have never not talked to each other.

Nothing could make that happen."
for what life holds for his eldest son?
"Whatever he does, he is very good," he says.

"He has autonomy running the business. It's entirely in his hands whether he wants to run it further, how hard he wants to run it. He's the principal for that business.

It's in his hands."
2000 to present: Principal LFG Holdings, Lowy family 2006: Appointed non-executive director of PBL.
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