Elevating Airfield Operations with Real-Time Intelligence at Rapid City Regional Airport

The Challenge

Rapid City Regional Airport (RAP) serves roughly 500,000 passengers annually and operates under FAA Part 139 certification, requiring rigorous daily airfield inspections, wildlife hazard management, and coordinated ARFF readiness. For years, the operations team relied on a patchwork of paper logs, shared spreadsheets, and verbal handoffs to track findings, assign corrective work, and demonstrate compliance. During a 2022 FAA certification inspection, staff struggled to quickly surface historical inspection records and closed work orders — a time-consuming exercise that exposed gaps in the airport's documentation trail and flagged the need for a more systematic approach.

Leadership recognized that a fragmented system was not just an administrative burden — it was a liability. With a small operations team responsible for everything from FOD walks to wildlife strike reporting, every inefficiency compounded into real risk.

The Approach

In early 2023, Rapid City Regional selected Aerosimple as its airport operations platform, rolling out a phased implementation that prioritized the workflows most critical to Part 139 compliance and day-to-day airfield safety. The Aerosimple team conducted on-site configuration sessions to map RAP's existing inspection routes and notification protocols directly into the platform.

• Airfield Inspections: Daily and night inspections are now completed on mobile devices, with real-time discrepancy flagging and automatic supervisor notifications.
• Work Orders: Maintenance corrective actions are created directly from inspection findings, assigned to technicians, and tracked to closure — eliminating the phone-tag cycle.
• FOD Management: Ops staff log FOD discoveries with photos and GPS coordinates, building a searchable history that informs hotspot analysis.
• Wildlife: Strike and sighting reports are submitted digitally and automatically formatted for USDA Wildlife Services reporting requirements.
• ARFF: Daily vehicle checks and equipment readiness logs replaced manual binders, giving the fire station chief instant visibility into fleet status.

Results

Within six months of full deployment, Rapid City Regional cut inspection documentation time by 52%, freeing operations staff to spend more time on the airfield rather than at a desk. Work orders that previously lingered for five or more days were resolved in an average of two days, driven by real-time assignment and mobile status updates. Most significantly, the airport's next FAA Part 139 certification inspection concluded with zero findings — a first in recent memory — with inspectors specifically citing the quality and accessibility of the airport's digital records.

Today, RAP's operations team points to Aerosimple as a foundational piece of their safety culture, providing the audit-ready documentation and operational visibility needed to manage a growing regional airport with confidence.