Thank You for Making Helicopter Day a Success
An Absolutely Awesome Event
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Mitchell Hynes. I'm the current President of the Virginia Helicopter Association, and I've been attending meetings with my Dad since I was a kid when the club started in 2006. When I became President of this small (but growing!) group in 2024, I never could've imagined the scale of event we were able to put on this year for Helicopter Day. I wanted to write this post to thank a few key people who made Helicopter Day the massive success that it was, as well as share a bit of 'Behind the Scenes' Info for everyone.
My first and biggest thanks goes to the massive crowds that showed up on Helicopter Day, even after we made the difficult decision to push our event back to our rain date of October 10th. This call, especially as last minute as it was, made a lot of our planning more difficult and significantly impacted our vendor, exhibitor, and attendee numbers, however, a huge crowd still managed to make their way out for the Rain Date! We appreciate the flexibility of our Virginia and Williamsburg community, and I want to personally thank everyone who came out to make this event a huge success. I hope each and every one of you learned something about helicopters, met the wonderful crews that were present, and maybe even got to go on a helicopter ride! We had over 500 cars attend the event over the course of the day! I'd also like to report that we had 0 injuries, and 0 damage to aircraft/property on helicopter day. Every attendee was respectful, and we had almost no trash to clean up after the event.
My next "Thank You" is for our wonderful venue and home, the Waltrip-Williamsburg Airport. JGG's manager, Heron, was one of the key players in making this event happen, and if it wasn't for her knowledge, expertise, and patience, it wouldn't have been near the success that it was. We'd also sincerely like to thank Mr. Waltrip, the owner of KJGG, and Heron for encouraging more events like this at the Airport. Their enthusiasm for the local community is extremely obvious in the freedom they give local organizations like us to host events on their grounds. Make sure to keep an eye on the KJGG Facebook for more events there in the future! A big shoutout as well to the local tenants of the Airport that had to put up with all of our helicopter shenanigans for the day!
Of course, I also can't be more proud of the VHA Officer Team that put this event together: Bob Tamplet, our Vice President; Alex Greene, our Treasurer; Eric Spain, our Secretary; Steven Burge, our Membership Chair; and Ray Jarman, our Member at Large. All of these gentlemen put in long hours and some late nights to make this event happen, all for nothing but their generosity and excitement for helicopters. Event planning certainly was not what most of them signed up for when taking officer positions in a helicopter organization, but they all did a fantastic job and are absolutely the reason this event was able to happen.
Next I'd like to thank the crews for the static display aircraft that came to show off their aircraft. The finest from the Virginia State Police, The Virginia Army National Guard, HeloAir, and LifeEvac did an amazing job at arriving on target, on time, in a safe and efficient manner. These crews, and the organizations that sent the aircraft, did this purely for public enjoyment, and we can't thank them enough for that. Flying helicopters is no cheap endeavor, and to spend the resources for a free public event like this is an amazing thing.
Our volunteers deserve a much bigger shoutout than I could ever give them here! We had over 50 volunteers for the event, and if you look across every picture of the event you see, the 'Red Shirts' are everywhere! From parking detail, to flight-line security, to collecting trash cans, and even holding up Porta-pottys so that they didn't get blown over by a UH-60, our volunteer force did amazing work. Many of our volunteers came to work this event having no prior affiliation with the Virginia Helicopter Association at all! They simply were excited to help their community in a fun and engaging way. To each and every one, I can't give enough of a Thank-You!
Our sponsors that made this event possible also deserve massive thanks. Their generosity covered expenses like toilets, safety barriers, speaker systems, food for our volunteers, the bounce house, and so much more. Without them, a small organization like the VHA would never be able to afford large events like this.
Vendors that we hired for this event, while paid, still deserve a massive shoutout. Especially given that we had a last minute rain-day push. All of our vendors were fantastic to work with, and extremely friendly and accomodating: Freedom Flush with our toilets; Grand Rental Station with the Safety Barriers; Chapman's Magic with the Bounce House; The food trucks: Sno-To-Go, Pete's Good Eats, Cajun Carry-Out; and Kevin with our Sound System.
Now, I'm of course biased, considering my day-to-day job outside of the VHA is to be the Chief Helicopter Pilot for Hampton Roads Helicopters, but I still want to offer a huge thanks to HRH. The HRH team operated two helicopters nonstop for 4 hours straight giving rides. That's over 150 people that got helicopter rides! All without a single safety incident. Peter and Dave did an amazing job flying, while Greg, Isabelle, Patrick and more did a great job of coordinating logistics. HRH Also repositioned the helicopters to JGG for no cost to the VHA, and provided rides at-cost to allow the VHA to benefit from the rides. Make sure to check HRH out if you ever want to get a longer helicopter tour, or learn to fly yourself!
We also had plenty of other attractions scheduled for Helicopter Day, and while many of them weren't able to make our rain date, James City County Fire, Cruz, VA Penninsula Community College, Williamsburg Aviation Scholarship program (WASP), and the Williamsburg Regional Library were all still able to attend. Their presence gave our attendees plenty to do, and we offer them a huge thanks for being there to hangout with us for the day!
I'm sure there are absolutely more people and groups that I've forgotten about that deserve a huge thank you. In this whole process, I've personally gained a whole new perspective on how many people it truly takes to make events like this work, and how quickly it become impossible for one person to keep track of it all. So if I've forgotten you in this post, please accept my sincerest apology and THANK YOU for the part you played in the event. Please reach out to me to chastise me for forgetting you, and I absolutely will correct my mistake ;)
Finally, I figured I'd wrapup by saying this certainly won't be the last event that the VHA hosts like this! We're hooked now! The success of this event has given us the confidence to push further, and we already have some things planned! If you were disappointed by the lack of the "Helicopter Olympics" at the Helicopter Day, don't worry, we were too! Due to how busy the rides were, we decided that Helicopter Olympics would need to take place on another day. While we don't have a date set yet, all of the prizes have "Helicopter Olympics 2026" printed on them, so expect an announcement pretty soon as to when we plan to get those done before the end of the year.
Even with the event being complete, we've still got a lot on our plate, so bear with us to finish up our wrap-up items over the coming days! Expect some updates to our website and Facebook soon to include links to a photo album for Helicopter Day, as well as more information about how the event went. If you have feedback for the event, please don't hesitate to reach out below. We want to do everything we can to make these events bigger and better in the future, so give me the good, the bad and any/all suggestions you may have. Please continue to tag our Facebook in any pictures and videos you had from Helicopter Day! Going back and seeing all of the amazing moments from the view of our attendees has been one of my favorite things to do since the end of the event yesterday.
Thank you for a wonderful Helicopter Day, and Fly Safe...
- Mitchell