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Weeks after air traffic controllers at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) withdrew their services to domestic airlines causing flight cancellations, the government has met two of the their demands. The partial withdrawal of services was to press home some demands which they felt were not being addressed to "meet safety requirements at the time". Speaking to the GNA in an interview an executive member of the Ghana Air Traffic Controllers Association (GATCA), Mr. William Amoako, said so far the government had met two of their demands and had assured them that the rest were being worked on. He said a principal concern of theirs was the position of a Deputy Director General for technical services that was vacant for over five years and this posed challenges to safety. The government has since appointed Mr. Boye Atoklo as acting Deputy Director General-Technical and the Deputy Director General - Finance and Administration has been replaced by Mr. Adbullai Alhassan. Mr. Amoako said the appointment of the Ag. DG-Technical was good as he was working hard to improve safety through identifying training needs of the technical departments including engineering, air traffic services and the Aeronautical Information Services. This, he said, would help improve safety and appealed to the government to make the appointment permanent. He said several issues were still outstanding as they could not be addressed overnight. These include the decoupling of the Air Navigation Services (ANS), resolving the impasse between Ghana, Togo and Benin over the management of the Accra FIR and the appointment of a new Director General. Mr Amoako said the role of the GCAA as both a regulator and a service provider did not allow the Authority to carry out its mandate as a regulator effectively as it acts as both "a referee and a player". Thus, decoupling of the two functions with ANS being an entity on its own would allow the GCAA to focus on regulation and it is also in line with requirements of ICAO's Universal Safety Audit Program (USOAP). He said moves by Benin and Togo to manage their own air spaces which, together with Ghana's airspace and parts of the Indian Ocean, make up the Accra Flight Information Region (FIR) was another issue yet to be resolved. Mr Amoako said although Benin and Togo had initially, since 2006, expressed interest in co-managing the airspace with Ghana and an agreement signed in 2008 to that effect, it had not been implemented leading to the call by these countries to manage their own air spaces. This, he went, would pose several challenges for both air traffic controllers and pilots because aircrafts would have to change frequencies at short intervals. Mr Amoako said the issue was being addressed with a GO TEAM set up by the three countries to review and implement the agreement. However, after meetings between the sector ministers of the three countries there was still the need for heads of government of the three countries, especially Ghana as the major stakeholder to facilitate the process. Mr Amoako has therefore appealed to the government to expedite action on the outstanding issues and gave the assurance that in spite of the challenges Ghana's airspace remained safe.