Indy...

[Mrlind]

Has anyone done any flight training, or do flight training in the Indy airspace? I will be out there soon and I was just wondering how the flying is there. Practice area/approaches, freqs, how is indy approach to deal with and what not... Any help would be awesome....

 

[TGatch]

Indy approach has been nice and helpful the few times I've gone through. Don't know much about any of the other stuff. I fly out of Cincinnati.

 

[jdlilfan]

It depends on who is working that sector at that time. I have had times where approach has forgot about us doing instrument approaches. Other times where they want us to cancel right away/ radar service terminated into the surrounding airports. Other times the service has been good and we get vectored right onto course to the FAF. Expect to never be able to get a clearance on the RCO's around the area airports. Out of all the times I have tried, no one has answered.

One time coming out of HFY, I wanted to show the student what its like to shoot an ILS @ 120kts to keep spaced with higher performance aircraft and jets in case they ever had to visit a busy airport while IFR. The controller got testy about us requesting to go to IND for a ILS. He literally asked us "isn't there another localizer in this state you can go practice on, I have an inbound push so you are going to get vectored all over". We said ok, no thanks we will go with plan B and but he insisted he could work us in. So then we proceded to get vectored all over for 5R while only 3 planes with 8 minutes of spacing in between were sent to the 5L. There was a controller change and the new guy asked why we have been sent all over and gave us a 2 quick vectors to final. The whole thing took 30-45 minutes to go all of 15NM in straight line distance. So since that event, I usually try to avoid IND.

 

[JLF]

I dig those folks. I did my instrument rating in their airspace, and still feel the need to send them a thank you card or something.

Always a pleasure to work with.