A little about our Flying Site

This photo was taken by Cinergy's Gary Hutcheson.  Gary and Cinergy
joined our club to perform testing of their AutoCopter autonomous helicopter system.

Our field is located on the West edge of Plainfield, off of US 40 at 39 deg. 41.392 min. North latitude x 86 deg. 24.356 min. West longitude.  Address to the Grounds Entrance is 501 W. Main Street, Plainfield, Indiana

 The Screaming Eagles R/C Club's Field consists of the following:

350' X 24' Asphalt Runway; 500' X 36' Cut Grass Runway (next to Asphalt), 180' Asphalt Pits, 100' Grass Pits, 2 Asphalt taxiways, paved pilot stations, 60' Control Line Circle, Shelter House with plenty of picnic tables, Frequency Board, Trash Bin, Port 'O John, and lots of great members.  The asphalt makes our site a very nice area to fly all year and in any weather. 

We are located on “Short Term Offender Program” grounds (formerly known as the Indiana Boy's School), so we have to abide by some rules set up by them like no alcohol, no smoking, no firearms, and no flying before noon on Sunday without prior consent, but they let us use a great area to have a flying club. We have a field with only a few trees and lots of open sky.

The area has some other advantages too, like the Indiana State Police Academy is right next door. They have both a driving course and a shooting range. This means that we're not the first thing people look at when they say 'Noise Problem'.

Another advantage is that our field is surrounded on three sides by farmed fields, but the farmers can't plant corn because it would be too easy for an escapee to hide in. This suits us fine, because I don't like what the corn does to an airplane (although the beans/weeds have been pretty bad in the last couple of years).

Although we do require you to be a member or a guest of a member to fly, everyone is invited out to the field. You take U.S. 40 to the west side of Plainfield and turn South at the historic Indiana Boy's School sign on the side of the hill. You go straight at the stop sign and follow the paved road around to our entrance on the left; you can't miss us.   We do need to turn on our hazard lights from the stop sign to our drive to tell the guards we're going to the field along with displaying a member or guest placard on the dash.  For more about this, see the March 2010 newsletter in the news page.

We had a summer flight program involving some of the boys when the facility was the Boy's School. One evening a week during the summer, a group of 10 to 12 boys come out to the field and we get to teach them a little about our hobby. We had a trainer on a buddy box and would take them up for a couple of minutes at a time, usually about three flights each. We would get a new group each week, so each student only gets five or ten minutes of stick time, but for some of these kids it's enough to show they're a natural. We gave them all a flight certificate and thank them for coming out. It's not much since some of them are only in there because they don't have anywhere else to go, but It gives them a chance to try out our hobby and take some of the mystery out of those little planes they keep seeing flying around outside their windows.  Now that the facility has been changed to STOP, we are working to find a way to continue this sort of program.