This weekend at Fly’n For Fun 2026, an aircraft being built from the ground up – by an all-women team comprising women from all around Australia – will take to the skies above regional New South Wales.
At Parkes Airport, participants have spent the week taking part in the BushCat Aircraft Build, a five-day, hands-on project bringing women together to assemble a light aircraft piece by piece before it takes a final flight test flown by a female test pilot.
The initiative is designed to create space for more women to gain hands-on experience in aviation, an industry where they remain underrepresented.
For Michele ‘Shelley’ Wood, the all-women BushCat build is the continuation of a journey that began more than a decade ago.
When she first connected with Soldier On around 2013, she volunteered as a support person on a trek along the Sandakan Death Marches trail in Borneo. What she did not expect was the impact it would have on her.
‘I saw some of the young men that I was walking with transform,’ Shelley says.
Participants who arrived as individuals in distress began to shift through the shared challenge.
She stayed connected – taking part in fundraising challenges, travelling to Turkey for a Gallipoli swim, and continuing to support veterans as their needs evolved.
That first Borneo experience, she says, changed her too.
‘Even though I had gone on that trip as a support person, I’d actually also had quite a life-changing experience.’
Creating a new adventure
Now, years later, she is excited about creating another pivotal experience as part of the BushCat Aircraft Build.
The project immediately appealed.
‘One of the things that I miss about being in the Defence Force is doing things that a lot of females might not necessarily participate in,’ she says. ‘I love challenges and I particularly love the physicality of a lot of what we did.’
For Shelley, the BushCat build also connects directly to her work in aviation, where she supports students working towards their first flying licence.
‘I’ll be able to participate in that and then come back and talk to the group of students that I’m in contact with every day about opportunities for working in different parts of the aviation industry.’
Her message is simple: there is more than one pathway into aviation.
But the draw of the BushCat project is not only professional.
It also recreates something she valued deeply during her service – working as part of a team towards a shared goal, this time with an aircraft taking shape in front of them.
‘It’s a sort of activity that really appeals to me – working as a team and reprising that sense of purpose that you often get when you’re in the Defence Force.’
Women supporting women
Kathryn ‘Kate’ Carlisle brings a different pathway into the all-women BushCat build.
After nearly 39 years of service across the Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force, she discharged in 2023, bringing with her a lifelong interest in engineering and aviation.
That interest began in childhood, helping her father work on bikes, cars and trucks, and attending air shows where she would study aircraft and ask how they worked.
It is a curiosity that has shaped her career – and one she now brings into the BushCat build in Parkes.
Kate’s connection with Soldier On began in 2012 when, as CO P3LMU, she supported the establishment of the new Soldier On office in Adelaide.
Kate says she is ‘most ecstatic about being part of a team building a BushCat aircraft, each with a different background and skill set, working on separate elements and bringing them together’.
For both women, the all-women BushCat Aircraft Build is as much about collaboration as it is about technical skill.
Together, they will step into the hangar not as observers, but as builders – contributing to something tangible, piece by piece and then watching that shared effort take flight.
