John Glenn Columbus International Airport

The Challenge

As one of Ohio's busiest commercial service airports, John Glenn Columbus International Airport (CMH) handles more than four million passengers annually and maintains a complex airfield environment that demands rigorous daily inspections, rapid maintenance response, and airtight FAA Part 139 compliance. For years, the airport's operations staff relied on a patchwork of paper inspection forms, disconnected spreadsheets, and manual radio hand-offs to document everything from pavement conditions and lighting deficiencies to wildlife strikes and FOD discoveries.

The consequences were real: critical defect notifications could sit unactioned for hours before reaching the maintenance crew, inspection records required manual consolidation before each audit cycle, and supervisors had no reliable way to monitor field activity in real time. With a growing operations team and increasing pressure from both the FAA and Columbus Regional Airport Authority leadership, CMH knew it was time to modernize.

The Approach

After evaluating several solutions, CMH selected Aerosimple for its airport-specific design and modular flexibility. Rather than replacing one monolithic system with another, the team rolled out targeted modules that addressed their highest-priority pain points first, then expanded over a six-month implementation window.

• Airfield Inspections — Digital daily and night inspection workflows replaced paper logs, with real-time submission and automatic timestamp capture for FAA recordkeeping.
• Work Orders — Defects flagged during inspections automatically generated work orders routed to the appropriate maintenance crew, eliminating the radio-and-spreadsheet relay.
• FOD Management — Field staff documented and tracked foreign object debris discoveries with photo capture and location tagging, creating a defensible record for each event.
• Wildlife — Strike and sighting reports were standardized across shifts, feeding directly into BASH program tracking and the FAA Wildlife Strike Database submission workflow.
• Safety — Hazard reporting and corrective action tracking gave the safety officer a single dashboard to monitor open items and closure deadlines.

Results

Within three months of going live, CMH operations staff reduced the time spent on inspection documentation by 68%, and the average time from a defect being noted in the field to an active work order dropped by 14 minutes — a meaningful gain during high-traffic morning push windows. Maintenance supervisors credited the automated routing with allowing faster pavement and lighting repairs before aircraft movement peaks.

The most significant milestone came during CMH's annual FAA Part 139 certification inspection: for the first time in recent memory, the airport received zero findings. Auditors noted the completeness and consistency of the digital inspection record as a particular strength. With a reliable operational foundation now in place, CMH is evaluating Aerosimple's ARFF and Environmental modules for the next phase of its modernization effort.