At two hours’ drive away from home, IND is an infrequent but feasible alternate airport for me. Generally, I’ll only bother to go that far if I can get a particularly good or cheap flight, or if I’m already planning to be in the area.
My first trip through Indianapolis was a visit to Seattle with some Columbus friends; IND had a direct flight to Seattle/Tacoma (SEA) on Northwest at the time. My friends got a ride out to Dayton to meet me and we all drove together to Indianapolis. The plan for the return trip was to land at IND at about 19:30, drive my friends from Indy to Columbus (about a 3 hour drive east on I-70) and then double back to return to the Dayton area (an hour and 15 minutes west). In retrospect, a direct flight probably wasn’t worth that drive…
…especially when the flight is six hours late. We didn’t land until 01:30, and hadn’t had dinner yet. A hotel wasn’t an option, according to one of the friends, as he had to be at work the next day, so we stopped at a Steak-n-Shake for a 02:00 dinner, and (with several gas station coffee breaks along the way) proceeded to drive to Columbus. The sun was rising by the time I dropped them off, and I turned around, getting back home just before 08:00.
Or 07:58, to be precise.
By the time I had my next couple trips through the airport, IND had opened its new midfield terminal. Both of these trips were for work, where I was planning to be in Indianapolis the weekend before or after anyway; even with the extra mileage, flying out of IND was in each case far cheaper than flying out of Dayton (DAY).
Indianapolis was also one of the first airports which conducted TSA PreCheck interviews, and thus was where I conducted my interview.