If dates had license plates, then March 30, 2016, would carry tags that read “First in Flight for Mitchell Hynes.”

Wednesday was the day Mitchell, a Nansemond-Suffolk Academy sophomore, was able to take his first solo flight in a helicopter.

“I’m pretty excited,” Mitchell said before taking flight. “I’m a little bit nervous as well, though.”

Wednesday was his 16th birthday, and that marks the day trainees are able to take their first solo flight in an aircraft if they have already received the proper training.

And if any 16-year-old ever was well trained for this mission, it was Mitchell.

“I was pretty much born to be there,” he said.

The Hynes family has been involved in aviation since Mitchell’s grandfather, Michael Hynes, first got bitten by the aviation bug as a small boy.

“I was 5 years old when my dad bought me a $5 airplane ride for my birthday,” Michael Hynes said. “The guy let me hold the stick and said, ‘You should be a pilot.’”

He joined the U.S. Air Force at 17 and spent four years on active duty. He later went on to found his own aviation company and was one of the first pilots of the Learjet in the 1960s.

He fathered six children, five of whom were boys, and all of the boys got bitten by the bug as well. As a whole, the family has logged more than 80,000 hours of flight time, Michael Hynes said.

Dave Hynes is the youngest of the six siblings and is Mitchell’s father. He spent 13 years in the Air Force and became co-owner of Hampton Roads Helicopters, which is based at the Hampton Roads Executive Airport off Route 58 in Chesapeake. The business buys and sells new and used aircraft, does maintenance, has a flight school and does charter work, and that’s the environment in which Mitchell has grown up.

“I’ve been doing it since I was 10,” he said of flying with his dad. “It started with hopping in with my dad when he was going somewhere.”

Despite Mitchell’s nerves, the morning went smoothly at Hampton Roads Executive Airport. Mitchell first took off with his dad, who’s also a pilot and instructor in addition to co-owning the business, with him. He flew a few flight patterns in the company of his dad to make sure he and the helicopter were feeling comfortable.

Then, with his family gathered to watch from the edge of the tarmac, Mitchell set the chopper back down. His father exited, leaned down and stepped away from the spinning rotors. Mitchell lifted the helicopter up and set it back down — one, two, then three times — and then took off for good.

“I knew this day was coming,” said his mother, Shanda Hynes, who admitted she’ll probably be more nervous when he starts driving a car — still legally three months down the road. “I’ve been dreading it for a while. Look how big he looks in there.”

His parents listened to him communicating his movements over the radio. His grandparents, an uncle and other family members watched the chopper as it circled the airport a few times. He then set it back down where he started.

“It was a lot lighter than usual,” Mitchell said of his first flight. “On the first pickup, I went to the right the first time, because there was no weight on the left.”

After congratulatory hugs and handshakes, Dave Hynes wielded a pair of scissors to cut a rectangle out of the back of his son’s shirt to be put on display. It’s an old aviation tradition after a first solo flight.

Later in the day, Mitchell took his first solo flight in an airplane.

Mitchell can’t receive his Federal Aviation Administration license for another year. He’ll have to get more solo flight time under his belt and then pass an oral knowledge examination as well as practice different maneuvers with an instructor — his dad — along for the ride.

Mitchell said he is definitely looking at a career in aviation, preferably as a pilot of some sort.