Sullivan, IN
Western Indiana coal country GA airport. Sullivan County sits along the Wabash River with significant coal mining heritage — historic mining-era buildings dot the surrounding towns.
Indiana's first state capital and the site of the most important Revolutionary War battle in the west. In 1779, George Rogers Clark marched 180 miles through flooded wilderness to surprise the British garrison here, effectively winning the Northwest Territory for the United States. The massive granite memorial (the largest outside Washington D.C.) is visible from the air along the Wabash River. Vincennes University (1801) is the oldest in Indiana.
Indiana's largest waterfall by volume — upper and lower falls in a sandstone gorge on Mill Creek. Not dramatic by Niagara standards, but the gorge itself is striking from the air, cutting a dark seam through otherwise gentle terrain. A covered bridge (one of Parke County's neighbors) sits near the upper falls. Best after heavy spring rains when the falls are running full.
31 historic covered bridges — more than any county in the US. The Bridgeton Bridge (1868) and Mansfield Bridge are the most photogenic from the air. At 2000ft AGL in mid-October, the hardwood canopy surrounding each bridge turns orange and crimson. The annual Covered Bridge Festival draws 1 million visitors. The bridge cluster is concentrated between Turkey Run and Raccoon Lake along Sugar Creek and Big Raccoon Creek.
Indiana University's Bloomington campus is one of the most beautiful in the country — 1,900 acres of limestone gothic buildings set among old hardwoods, built almost entirely from the same Salem limestone quarried a few miles south around Bedford. The local stone gives the whole campus a unified warm-grey palette that shifts color with the light, and from the air that grey stone and the dense old-growth canopy are what set the campus apart from the town grid around it. The landmark a pilot will recognize is Memorial Stadium, on the north edge of campus — now the home of the 2025 national champions. Under coach Curt Cignetti (google him), Indiana football — the losingest program in the history of the sport coming into the season — went 16–0 and beat Miami for the first football national title in school history, behind Heisman winner Fernando Mendoza. The stadium and the domed Assembly Hall (basketball) next to it are the most identifiable structures on campus from altitude. At the heart of the old campus, the Sample Gates limestone arch opens onto Dunn's Woods, a preserved remnant of the original forest with the oldest buildings curving around it. If you land and make the trip into campus, two collections reward it: the Lilly Library holds a Gutenberg Bible, a Shakespeare First Folio, and the manuscript of Lincoln's last public address; and Thomas Hart Benton's sweeping mural cycle "A Social History of Indiana," painted for the 1933 World's Fair, is installed in the IU Auditorium. Bloomington itself is a college town in the wooded hills of south-central Indiana, with the Brown County hills and the Nashville art colony just east and Lake Monroe to the southeast.