The CIVL Bureau has created a new Officer position, and we are very pleased to have Violeta Jimenez on board as the first office holder.

The FAI/CIVL structure provides for each member country to appoint a Delegate to CIVL to represent the interests of the pilots in their country. These delegates are tasked with gathering input from, as well as communicating back to, the pilots in their country. Non-delegate pilots may, and do, also contribute directly in the CIVL committees and working groups and in fact constitute the majority of those groups. These structures will remain in place, but CIVL is augmenting this with increased direct communication with pilots who are not taking part in the working groups  in order to gather feedback on proposals and bids and other topics that the delegates and the Bureau are working on. This additional input can then inform the work of the committees and working groups, and the delegates themselves as they vote on proposals and bids.

The Pilot Relationship Officer position is being created to ensure that CIVL has a coherent, structured approach to gathering pilot input and communicating back, to ensure that polls are correctly designed to create meaningful data, and that proper analysis is done on the results. Violeta is the perfect person for this job and CIVL is grateful for her willingness to take on this critical role.

Violeta has been flying paragliders for 11 years and racing them for five. She is one of two women to be on the overall podium of a Paragliding World Cup. When she is not airborne, she works at a Fortune 500 company as an AI innovation director. She helps clients run their businesses better using data science, and struggles periodically to keep the word “parasailing” out of their vocabulary. She is eager to use her knowledge of data and analytics to evolve free flight.

Photo credits: Yassen Savov