Okayevin Walsh wasn’t trying to get wrapped up in aviation once more when he began volunteering at Belleville’s Yankee Air Museum 25 years in the past. “I really hadn’t wanted anything more than to help out and just sweep the floors,” he says.
He ended up president of the museum and co-founder of its annual flagship occasion, the Thunder Over Michigan Air Show, which is able to have a good time its twenty third yr this month.
Now, removed from sweeping any flooring, Walsh is trying to increase the occasion from its house at Ypsilanti’s Willow Run Airport to different cities throughout Michigan — and perhaps even exterior the state. Efforts will kick off with a “trial show” in Muskegon deliberate for 2023.
It’s a option to increase the group’s financial stability but additionally “an opportunity for outreach — to expand our mission of educating people about aeronautics and its history in America,” Walsh says.
It was such dedication, partially, that earned him the business’s most prestigious honor — the International Council of Air Shows Sword of Excellence — in 2021. The award, beforehand bestowed upon notables like Paul Poberezny, Bob Hoover, and the U.S. Navy Blue Angels, acknowledges exemplary management and innovation in and dedication to the air present enterprise.
Walsh has made strides throughout his time in the business, however again in 1997, he was strolling a a lot completely different path. He’d not too long ago launched what would turn into a profitable 18-year profession in bodily remedy however was suffering from a nagging sensation that one thing was lacking.
When he was rising up, his father was the director of Canada’s largest army aeronautic show, Airshow London, and the younger Walsh received concerned any means he may. This included stuffing envelopes and, later, parking vehicles forward of the occasion.
“As a kid, the air show and the production of the air show were the things I looked forward to most each year,” he says. “I got to see the belly of the beast, and I absolutely loved it.”
So, when he moved to Michigan and found the Yankee Air Museum, it appeared like the excellent place to volunteer. The relationship was alleged to be strictly informal — and it was, till a couple of years later, when museum directors needed to introduce an annual occasion. In want of somebody with the know-how, they recruited Walsh as their information.
“I said I’d give them one year and that’s all,” he says.
The first Thunder Over Michigan passed off in 1999. At the time, the occasion was not more than a small symposium. But it was a huge success.
Walsh’s “one year” shortly turned into two — then three, after which 4 — as the present quickly constructed up steam. Crowds had been rising, they usually needed extra. The museum fortunately obliged, rounding up extra plane for show and, later, including modest flight demonstrations. By 2004, it resembled a conventional air present, with a combine of air pageantry and historic floor displays.
As Walsh slowly acknowledged his incapacity to go away the present behind, he additionally got here to really feel more and more disillusioned together with his career. “I don’t believe work should feel like work. I think you should love your job if you can. And at that point in time, sports medicine was starting to feel kind of like work.”
So, when the museum provided him the place of full-time government director in 2012, he didn’t suppose twice.
With Walsh at the helm, Thunder Over Michigan has since booked reoccurring visits from the Blue Angels and the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and turn into one of the most profitable air reveals in North America. It even managed to develop via the COVID-19 pandemic.
Forced to cancel the 2020 occasion, the museum had provided ticketholders the choice of receiving extra passes for the 2021 present in place of a refund. But handing out further tickets proved powerful for a present that, it turned out, would additionally have to be socially distanced (and nonetheless worthwhile).
Collaborating with air reveals round the nation, organizers devised a drive-up format that might permit friends to look at safely from their vehicles. To make good on all these further tickets they’d promised, Walsh pitched splitting every day into two reveals, which, his workforce surmised, would possibly simply protect their backside line. That yr, Thunder Over Michigan turned the first air present to carry 4 drive-up performances in a single weekend. Each one completely bought out.
Organizers had seen the modifications as a tolerable nuisance. But postshow surveys confirmed that an amazing 93 % of clients truly most well-liked the new format. In-show entry to the luxurious and comfort of their autos, it appeared, held nice attraction for the fashionable viewers.
Shocked as he’d been, Walsh stays a staunch believer in heeding buyer suggestions and has determined to copy the drive-up format for this yr’s present. Beyond that, nonetheless, he’s not sure whether or not it’s going to turn into the establishment. “As long as our customers tell us what they’d like, that’s what we’ll do,” he says.
Thunder over Michigan, July 16 &17, Willow Run Airport, 801 Willow Run Airport, Ypsilanti; yankeeairmuseum.org
