Raquel Girvin has served as the Regional Administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Western-Pacific Region, since December 2018. As the Senior FAA Official in the geographic area, she provides leadership on key agency priorities, such as horizontal integration across the FAA Lines of Business and Staff Offices to ensure the Agency provide consistent stakeholder support and engagement.

The office partners with Federal, state, and local governments and others to promote aviation safety and education across the region. The office is responsible for cross-agency coordination (or horizontal integration) on wide-ranging issues, including airspace and procedure modernization, runway safety, aviation workforce development, finance, information technology, policy, human resources, and civil rights regional emergency preparedness and building services.

The Western-Pacific Region covers over 18.7 million square miles of airspace. In addition to its four states Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada, and U.S. territories of American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam. Three Compact countries receiving Airport Improvement Funding are also included in the Region: the Republic of Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands.

Before becoming the Regional Administrator, Ms. Girvin managed programs in the Office of Aviation Safety’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration Pilot Program (IPP). From 2013 to 2018, Raquel served as Deputy Director for Policy and Planning (APO) at FAA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where she advanced a wide-ranging portfolio of projects and crosscutting policy issues such as FAA Reauthorization, NextGen implementation, and integration of new users in the NAS.

In 2016, she served as senior advisor to the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office Director on international issues. Raquel joined the FAA in 2007 as Manager of the FAA’s Noise Division in the Office of Environment and Energy in Washington DC. Before federal service, Raquel worked in the commercial aerospace industry as advanced design aerodynamics and propulsion engineer at Boeing-Southern California and McDonnell Douglas Corporation. She also performed airfoil research at NASA Langley Research Center.