Jennie Bewes

Brainstormer, Connector, Explorer, Idea generator, Startup

[ADHD version] Builds & flies wearable jet aircraft. Designs helicopter stunts for movies & TV. Turns audacious ideas into safe, compliant, high-impact realities. [Full story] I have long been fascinated by the invisible forces that shape human behaviour — the beliefs, assumptions and subconscious narratives that quietly determine what we do, and what we rule out before we even begin. For 25 years, I worked across telecommunications, finance, media, technology and law, leading innovation inside large organisations. And I kept seeing the same pattern: bold ideas rarely fail because the technology is impossible. They fail because of the human system around them — fear, hierarchy, identity, risk perception and the gravitational pull of the familiar. Curious about what it truly takes to shift those deeper forces — and driven by a personal mission to live the second half of my life like an adventure book worth writing — I decided to test that theory on myself. I walked away from everything that had defined my life — the career, the house, the husband (though we remain best friends) — and set myself a Guinness World Record challenge: to fly a jetpack across Australia, a distance greater than the diameter of the moon. The real challenge was never whether it could be done. It was whether I could unlock the capacity within myself to do it — despite being entirely new to the aerospace field. To get there, I had to start rewriting the mental code I had been running for years — habits and assumptions I had quietly accepted as truth. Challenging them was confronting, because many turned out to be wrong. When they fell away the foundations of my life destabilised, but the world didn’t shrink — it expanded. The challenge was no longer what was possible, but deciding which of the seemingly infinite new possibilities to pursue. That shift in mindset ultimately led me to become the second woman in history to fly a jetpack. And when COVID halted further training, I used the same reframing to found an aerospace company to design, build and fly one of my own. What began as a personal experiment in challenging assumptions has since become the foundation of my work: realising ambitious ideas in high-consequence environments where the margin for error is razor thin, and “can’t” is the instinctive response. Through iJETPACK Aeronautics I lead the design, development and flight testing of wearable jet aircraft, navigating the engineering, regulatory and human challenges of bringing an entirely new category of flight into existence. Through Specialist Helicopters, I deliver high-impact aerial filming and helicopter stunt sequences for the motion picture industry, from feature films to live broadcast. Different worlds from corporate, but the same underlying lesson: Many of the limits we experience are not imposed by reality. They are borne from assumptions we never thought to question.

🚀 Making impossible fly. 🚁 Flying Helicopters & Jetpacks. 🧬 Experiencing everything it means to be human. 👫 Cheerleading others to realise their dreams. ⚛️ Testing the reality of motivational quotes.

Ban the word “can’t.” It freezes possibility before we’ve tested it. Constraints are real — but so is choice. Repeated language quietly defines the size of our lives.

Career Transformation, Making impossible fly, Negotiating For Purpose, Resilience through Adversity

Engineering courage.