Indianapolis Regional

Built by the Indianapolis Water Company between 1941 and 1943 by damming Fall Creek, Geist filled to capacity on March 17, 1943 as the second-largest man-made lake in Indiana; it still helps supply Indianapolis water today. Under the surface lies Germantown, a village founded in 1834 that the water company bought out and flooded; 45 homesteads went under. The long branching arms wind between the subdivisions of the city's northeast side, a magnet for boaters since the boating ban lifted in 1953 and a familiar shape from the air.

A $200 million, 400,000-square-foot Formula 1 facility built on land that used to be part of Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport; a 2015 deal between Fishers and the Indianapolis Airport Authority opened 211 of the field's 445 acres to development, and this is what rose on it. The building is the corporate headquarters for the Cadillac F1 team and TWG Motorsports and a manufacturing facility for the team's race cars; Cadillac joined Formula 1 as the grid's eleventh team for the 2026 season, with additional operations in North Carolina and at Silverstone in England. The site was originally planned as Andretti Global's campus for its IndyCar and sports-car programs, museum included, before the project pivoted to Formula 1. For pilots the notable part is the setting: a world-championship race shop sharing a fence line with a general-aviation field, visible from the pattern.

An 800-acre outdoor living history museum along the White River in Fishers, about 4nm north-northeast of KUMP; created by Eli Lilly in 1934. On the grounds: 1836 Prairietown, a recreated Indiana village with costumed interpreters; an 1863 Civil War Journey; and the 1859 Balloon Voyage, a tethered helium balloon commemorating the Lafayette flight that carried the nation's first airmail. The orange-and-yellow balloon, one of only five tethered helium balloons in the country, rises to about 370 feet on its cable in good weather during the April-through-October season, and it is the property's signature from the air.

Indianapolis devotes more acreage to honoring its war dead than any other American city, and only Washington, D.C. has more war memorials. The center is the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Monument Circle, a 284-foot limestone obelisk dedicated in 1902; raised for Indiana's Civil War dead, it honors Hoosier veterans of every war before World War I, and at completion it was the second-tallest monument in the country behind the Washington Monument. It stands at the exact center of the original city plan: Alexander Ralston, who had helped survey Washington, D.C., laid out Indianapolis in 1821 with the streets radiating from this circle. An observation level near the top is reached by 330 steps or a small elevator, and from it the flat grid of central Indiana runs to the horizon. Five blocks north, the Indiana World War Memorial Plaza is a corridor of formal malls, fountains, and monuments; its centerpiece, the Indiana World War Memorial, is a massive limestone building modeled on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, housing the Shrine Room beneath a single suspended American flag. The American Legion keeps its national headquarters on the plaza. On the downtown canal, the USS Indianapolis Memorial honors the cruiser torpedoed in 1945, the worst single loss of life at sea in US Navy history, near the Medal of Honor Memorial along the canal walk.