RAPID CITY, SD – Passengers at Rapid City Regional Airport will have to take a slight detour to the east inside the building to get to the new ticket counters – a minor inconvenience in the airport’s multi-million-dollar expansion project.

On Tuesday, the new ticket counters at the airport were officially open for business and already busy with people lining up readying for their flights.

What those people didn’t see was the new inline baggage handling system behind the wall – also operational this week – that will make baggage handling more efficient, and safer for airport employees.

Rapid City Regional Airport is one of the nation’s smaller airports but it’s managing the demands of the increasingly popular Black Hills as a destination and the additional airline passengers that go along with that.

To manage the increased traffic demands at the airport, the new TSA check-in area recently opened and the new ticket counters and inline baggage system went live this week.

“This will give us the ability to expand, have more space for new carriers to come in, to have more space for the existing carriers who are here and just get to be a more efficient operation when it comes to the loading of baggage onto an aircraft,” Patrick Dame, Executive Director of the Rapid City Regional Airport said.

Rapid City airport’s terminal was built in the 1980s and, other than some renovations in 2012, hasn’t had extensive work. The work recently completed was about $80 million and addressed efficiency and the working environment for the employees.

“It’s really been about a nine to 10-year process that we've gone through to be able to get to this point today,” Dame said. “So, when you start to look at the amount of time it takes to get a major project… you know, to be able to get the funding for it, work through, get the designs done, and get to construction, it is a major, major process that takes a lot of years.”

The new ticket counters are just to the east of the former ones. A temporary wall, seen here, will be removed when construction on the former ticket counters is complete and the airport will have nearly doubled ticket counter space. The entire ticket counter project should be completed by May.

Concourse expansion is next on the project list - Dame said the airport will add five gates to the existing seven to accommodate more passengers and airlines.

“So, this will give us the ability to expand that hold room, get a little bit more comfort for the passengers that are there, but also get us more gate parking places because as we grow, we're going to continue to grow air service going forward through the years,” Dame said.

Project 1 is currently underway at the airport which includes the ticketing and check-in areas. Completion of the first project – TSA area, ticket counters and inline baggage system - is expected in May and will run about $80 million.

Project 2 - costing between $110 million to $120 million - will get underway in the near future and consist of adding five gates to the existing seven at the airport. To expand the footprint, crews will tear down three existing gates and rotate the concourse 45 degrees, so it sits perpendicular to the runway.

Pre-work is underway for Project 2, but groundbreaking isn’t expected until September 2027 followed by 20 months of construction.

“From a development standpoint we hear a lot from our customers about the needs for the development, the need for growth in here, also the need for parking garages and things like that,” Dame said. “And, you know, understand as we work through it, we're really working to eat an elephant one bite at a time…. So, we are working towards that future. We think this airport's got a very bright future, but this is all part of the process.”

Behind the scenes, the new airport inline baggage handling system will increase efficiency and worker safety.