Driving innovation at Charlotte Airport

Despite officially stepping into the brand-new Innovation and Experience Director position at Charlotte Douglas Airport four years ago, it’s only been in the last year, post-pandemic, that Martha Edge has been able to focus on non-Covid matters.

“Covid really pushed us back as we had to step back into that operational role,” she says. “We can now focus on the things that we were trying to build pre-pandemic within this very new group and continue to look at these problem-solving elements.”

Her responsibilities include overseeing collaboration between business intelligence, customer engagement, innovation and implementation, and marketing. Her main focus is looking at technology-driven solutions as well as non-tech fixes across the airport.

“It’s a very large reach with a very small number of people so the biggest challenge for me is how do we build the buy-in for innovation and experience at CLT [Charlotte Douglas Airport]?” she says. “How do we promote ourselves within the organisation to really make sure that we’re making the best use of our time and being as helpful as we can to the folks that we are serving here at the airport.”

Customer focus

A large number of those people the airport serves are from American Airlines. Charlotte Airport is the carrier’s second largest hub which brings both benefits and challenges.

Edge says that having such a large “customer” makes it easy to bounce ideas off of one another and that American Airlines is receptive to testing innovation and ideas.

“The challenge is we have to make sure that we’re always including the other air carriers because it’s very easy to have tunnel vision and just focus on the one airline.”

One benefit of being such a large hub for American Airlines includes being chosen as the location to house US Air 1549, better known as the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane, at the soon-to-be-revamped Sullenberger Aviation Museum (US Air merged with American Airlines in 2013).

Destination CLT

This fits squarely with the airport’s Destination CLT strategy. Part of this includes a six-year project that will expand the terminal lobby and condense five security checkpoints to three very large security checkpoints, complete with all the new upgraded equipment for Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screening, including automated lanes.

“We’re going to be gaining a lot of lobby space and circulation space,” says Edge. “We’re really excited about just the experiential opportunity for that. We’re adding a lot of passenger experiences there by way of art with local and national artists.”

A new upper and lower roadway is already complete which will include subterranean and elevated passenger walkways to eliminate cross traffic between passengers and vehicles, and a fourth parallel runway is being built which includes end-around taxiways.

Owned and operated by the City of Charlotte, the airport and city work close together particularly in promoting the city as a destination.

“Our city as a whole is growing and we are still a very affordable city to live in,” Edge explains. “We have the lowest cost per enplanement at CLT airport and the lowest fees of all of the airports by far.I   believe that is one of the areas that we are absolutely excelling in and where we are leading the nation.”