Des Moines International Airport Enhances FAA Compliance and Operational Efficiency with Aerosimple

The Challenge

Des Moines International Airport (DSM) serves roughly 2.5 million passengers annually and operates under the full weight of FAA Part 139 certification requirements. For years, the operations team managed airfield inspections on paper forms that were manually transcribed into spreadsheets at the end of each shift — a process prone to transcription errors, version conflicts, and hours of rework ahead of every FAA audit cycle. Wildlife activity logs, FOD reports, and corrective work orders existed in separate systems with no reliable link between them, making it difficult for supervisors to verify that a hazard identified during a morning inspection had actually been resolved before the next departure bank.

As the airport began planning a terminal expansion and saw daily operations complexity increase, leadership recognized that the existing workflow would not scale. A single missed documentation step could mean a finding during an annual Part 139 inspection — a risk the team was no longer willing to accept.

The Approach

After evaluating several general-purpose maintenance platforms, DSM selected Aerosimple because of its aviation-specific data model and out-of-the-box alignment with Part 139 checklists. The implementation began with a phased rollout over approximately ten weeks, starting with the modules most directly tied to daily compliance obligations.

• Airfield Inspections — Digital, time-stamped inspection rounds replacing all paper forms, with automatic NOTAM flagging for relevant surface closures.
• Work Orders — Deficiency-to-resolution tracking linked directly to inspection findings, giving shift supervisors real-time closure status.
• FOD Management — Structured FOD walk logs with location mapping, enabling trend analysis across runways and taxiways.
• Wildlife — Standardized wildlife strike and sighting records feeding directly into FAA Wildlife Strike Database submission workflows.
• Safety — Safety reporting forms accessible to all airfield personnel from mobile devices, increasing near-miss capture rates without adding administrative burden.

The operations team worked with Aerosimple's onboarding specialists to configure inspection templates to DSM's specific runway and taxiway geometry, ensuring that every required element of the Part 139 self-inspection checklist was represented in the digital workflow from day one.

Results

Within three months of full deployment, DSM's operations team saw inspection documentation time drop by 68%, with supervisors reclaiming roughly 90 minutes per shift previously spent on paperwork. Average work order close-out time fell from just over 40 minutes to under 20 — a 22-minute improvement — because technicians could acknowledge, update, and close assignments directly from the airfield without returning to a terminal workstation.

Across the first full year of use, the reduction in administrative labor associated with audit preparation, manual report compilation, and inter-departmental status chasing translated to an estimated $94,000 in avoided labor costs. Equally important to the team: DSM's most recent FAA Part 139 inspection concluded with zero documentation findings — a first in recent memory.