Kokomo, IN
Glenndale is thirteen acres of privately owned, public-use turf five miles southwest of Kokomo, flying since January 1968: a 2,048-foot grass strip with crops planted fifty-five feet off either side of centerline, and no fuel or services on the field. Small field, big footnote: the inaugural Kokomo Biplane Fly-In, June 2020, gathered four Baby Great Lakes biplanes here at once, hosted by Michelle and Ron Beachy, the type-club couple based on the field; the Baby Lakes community recorded it as the largest gathering of the tiny homebuilts to date.
Originally Bunker Hill Naval Air Station (1942), then a Strategic Air Command base that stood nuclear alert through the Cold War before drawing down to a joint civil-military Air Reserve base in 1994. Renamed for astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom, the Indiana native born in Mitchell (southern Indiana, about 130 miles south of Peru). The outdoor aircraft display includes a B-47 Stratojet, B-58 Hustler, F-14 Tomcat, and A-10 Warthog — all visible from pattern altitude. The 12,500ft military runway occasionally hosts KC-135 tanker operations.
The only active circular paved airport in America. During WWII (the concrete mat went down in the fall of 1943), the U.S. Navy poured an 1,800-foot-wide octagonal landing surface here as a satellite field for NAS Bunker Hill. The design let pilots land in any wind direction — a concept that sounds logical but creates more problems than it solves (guaranteed crosswind on a curved surface). After the war, the Navy left and tiny Converse, Indiana inherited the strangest runway in the country. A single painted runway was added later, but the octagonal pad remains. It went viral in 2025 when a pilot found it on Google Maps and called it 'the weirdest airport in America.' Fly over it and the shape is unmistakable — a geometric anomaly in a sea of Indiana farmland. Land if you dare (1800ft!).
This forest-ringed reservoir was the site of the last battle fought in Indiana between Native Americans and U.S. military forces (1812). The annual Mississinewa 1812 reenactment every October is one of the largest War of 1812 reenactments in the country — sometimes visible from the air as encampments along the shore. The reservoir itself is beautiful from altitude, surrounded by hardwood forest with minimal development.
The Indianapolis Water Company's second reservoir after Geist, built by damming Cicero Creek northwest of Noblesville; it filled in early 1956 and doubled the city's water supply when it came online. Named for Howard Morse, the company executive who planned it. The lake runs about six and a half miles from the dam at the Noblesville end north to the town of Cicero at its head, 1,500 acres with roughly 35 miles of shoreline, nearly all of it lined with homes and marinas; a clean orientation point in the farm country north of the city.