Business View Magazine May 2023

225 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 5 about a place like Indianapolis Executive is that it really is more of a blank canvas moving forward – in the military, there is not a lot of freedom to decide how individual airports will move forward, but here we can carve our own path.” “It’s also been really interesting,” he admits, “to begin something during the outbreak of the pandemic. I really think we’re going to look back at this period and study it closely. I’m sure you’ll see the effects of the Covid era linger on for a little bit, but the other side is that we have used this time to imagine how to move forward differently. In terms of the airport, we saw that initial dip, which I think every sector across every business saw, but then about halfway through 2020 people started to get a little antsy and started to want to get out.” “Obviously, commercial aviation struggled with that dip, but when you look at the charter and private flying sectors, those numbers really went up. The place kind of exploded from the end of 2020 through 21 and we are only now catching up. As far as 2023 goes, it is early in the INDIANAPOL IS E XECUT IVE AI RPORT year, but we are expecting things to level out at a level that exceeds 2019,” Sachs relayed. Indianapolis Executive Airport is classed as a reliever airport for the Indianapolis area. The area has grown such that the airport now finds itself more on the edge of the city than out of town. The dichotomy between rural and urban still exists, though, and as Sachs explains, if you look one way you see the city, but if you look the other it is corn fields as far as the eye can see. It was 1957 when the airport was built by Campbell Aviation and named Terry Airport. At that time, it had a north-south 3000-foot bituminous runway and a 3000-foot sod runway that ran northeast-southwest. In 1965 the airport was sold to the Van Sickle Family and quite a few improvements including lengthening the runway to 5,160 feet were undertaken as well as adding more hangars.