(Photo by Hannah Gunnell/South Indy Connect photo) The Greenwood Rotary Club heard a presentation from Greg Hill, an instructor at the Aeronautical Center of Technology, about the center during Monday’s meeting at Central Nine. The center is located at the Indy South Greenwood Airport. The club meets at noon every Monday at the career center’s restaurant.
By HANNAH GUNNELL
Greg Hill and others built the Aeronautical Center of Technology at the Indy South Greenwood Airport with volunteers and donations, he told the Greenwood Rotary Club during their Monday afternoon lunch.
The tech center, now a nonprofit agency, was founded on the north end of the airport with the construction of a hangar in August 2020. Hill, a pilot with a Bachelor of Science from Purdue University in Electrical engineering, joined Roger Tomey, Erwin Salazar, and Alan Gluff in volunteering to build the hangar to meet the needs of a flight school for high school students — more specifically, Hill did the electrical work on the hangar. Shortly after, he was appointed president of the Greenwood Chapter 1354 Experimental Aircraft Association, who oversees the program.
“It kept me busy during covid,” Hill joked.
Now, Hill is the center’s Rocketry and Launch Systems instructor. The Aeronautical Center of Technology (ACT) offers high school students the opportunity to earn up to 21 credit hours in aviation at Ivy Tech, the ability to explore the aircraft maintenance program (AMP), and even earn a private pilot’s license.
The building includes a classroom space for ground school flight training, a shop project (where students are building a RV-12 aircraft), a rocket room for building rockets, and a couple of flight simulators. Of the two flight simulators, one is IFR certified through the Federal Aviation Administration, which means students can log those hours toward their private pilot’s license, which was paid for by the Johnson County Community Foundation. The other was built by center volunteers and is primarily used for practice.
Last year, the program saw 11 students from Johnson and Southern Marion counties, including Roncalli, Greenwood, Lutheran, Franklin Central, and homeschool students. This program comes at a cost to those students of just over $6,000/year, but there are scholarships available that can help bring that cost down to about $1,500 out of pocket for the student’s parents.
Hill said the ACT is also offering an “Aviation Pinch Hitter” course, which is for nonpilots to practice flying and landing a plane in a scenario where the pilot is incapacitated.
(Rotary Club president Julia Reynolds remarked that her husband was a commercial pilot, and she’d had that discussion with him many times while in the air.)
While Hill had a pretty heavy role in the center’s founding, there was a long list of volunteers and donors who helped get this project off the ground: Joe Thompson and Dean Cantrell, Mike Speedy, Ray Skillman, RJE Business Furniture, Ivy Tech, Home Depot, Sertoma Club, Johnson County Community Foundation, Steve Dryer, Save Steiner, Dave Kovach, Toger Tomey, Linda Gibson, Allen Gluff, Adam French, Erwin Salazar, Avery Taylor, Terry Terhune, Greenwood Mayor Mark Myers, and the many members of the EAA 1354.
More information about the Aeronautical Center of Technology can be found at https://www.flyact.org/.
The Greenwood Rotary Club meets every week at noon at the Central Nine Career Center restaurant. Culinary students enrolled at the center cook lunch for members and guests. The club has about 25 members. The club features a guest speaker each week.
