The most important component in an intermittent gas lift installation is the pilot valve. Its selection and proper calibration determine the success of the gas lift design. Recent tests performed in a field scale installation equipped with an experimental well and careful observations of the performance of real wells on intermittent gas lift in Lake Maracaibo have shown the importance of the proper selection of the area ratio of the pilot section and the main port diameter. Usually, the designer has a variety of area ratios of the pilot section to choose from and its selection will depend on the type of gas lift operation, choke controlled or use of time-cycle controllers, and the volume of gas needed per cycle. In some cases, the lowest commercially available area ratio will still be too large with the result of not being able to inject below a certain volume of gas per cycle. The over-injection per cycle takes place because the minimum spread attainable is greater than needed. This situation occurs when the tubing-casing annulus is large and the valve size that can be installed in the well is smaller than the 1 ½-inch valve. Hundreds of wells in Lake Maracaibo with 7-inch casings and 2 7/8-inch tubing can not be efficiently lifted because of the lack of commercially available pilot valves with small area ratios. The diameter of the main gas injection orifice is a fixed value for a particular valve model. The size of this orifice is important for two reasons: The size of the injection orifice, together with the injection pressure and tubing load, determines the velocity of the liquid slug being lifted. If the size of the orifice is too small, which is usually the case for 1-inch size valves, the liquid fallback is increased due to low liquid slug velocities. Small injection orifice diameters increase gas injection time and therefore limit the liquid production of the well, especially if the optimum cycle time is of short duration. Tests performed in an experimental well, and presented in this paper, show how a new 1-inch pilot valve design was able to increase the gas lift efficiency. The main features of the new gas lift valve, its calibration procedure and its performance in several real wells are also presented in this paper.