Qantas refused to let its aircraft use Perth Airport for three hours on Friday night because AirServices Australia couldn’t muster enough staff to provide air traffic control in the area.

It has been a well-kept secret in recent months that AirServices Australia is so bad at maintaining staffing levels that it has at times left the pilots of passenger jets to organise their own safe separation from other jets.

Clearly something snapped in Qantas over this festering problem. With the support of management Qantas chief pilot Chris Manning pulled the plug on its transcontinental services for the duration. Captain Manning told Perth media: “Qantas had deemed it unsafe to operate in this area due the downgrading of controlled air space which would impact critical ascent and descent profiles.”

Four transcontinental Qantas services were delayed by its mini boycott and there were knock-on effects for hundreds of other passengers.

Expect more claims and counter claims to follow. AirServices claimed three or four controllers called in sick. Surely it knew if it was three or four. The controllers claim AirServices is lying and that the roster was so tight it collapsed when only one of their number couldn’t report for duty.

According to emails circulating among members of the Civil Air union, the Melbourne ATC centre (which shares large-scale coverage of controlled airspace with the Brisbane centre) was 39 staff short on Saturday, forcing the airlines to allow four minutes’ space between their jets and any others instead of the normal two minutes.

The effects in busy areas like Sydney-Melbourne are highly undesirable. And laughable, given that Australia has one of the finest air traffic control systems in terms of infrastructure, and a third world indifference to properly manning it.

A spokesman for AirServices, Bryan Nicholson, says pilots entering and leaving the unmanned Perth air space would self-monitor.

Qantas said not on its jets. Virgin Blue kept flying. Self-monitoring air space is a big ask if unexpected issues like fog arise on approach, or pilots have to contend with the unexpected, like cabin pressure or systems problems, when their workload is very high and extremely critical to safety.

And in other air news, there are unconfirmed reports that a very simple explanation for the British Airways crash landing at London Airport last week has emerged from the flight data recorder.

It is being said the auto throttles which controlled the engine power during the landing approach were not “armed”.

Which would neatly explain why the engines didn’t respond as expected. Perhaps too neatly. Arming the auto throttles is part of a pre-arrival check list that both pilots should have completed, and it comes with its own in-built cross checking procedure to ensure each item is checked. But if in fact they both failed to ensure this most fundamental step had been taken, the point at which the auto-throttles were to have authorised more power from the engines was also the point at which it was too late to save the day.

This could go down as one of three major auto throttle related issues in the last year. The pilots that nearly dropped a Jetstar A320 onto the ground during a missed approach in fog to Melbourne last July set the throttles to the wrong detent for safely completing their intended go-around.

And the worst of all was a similar bungle on a TAM A320 on landing at Sao Paulo last year, except that it tore off the end of the runway killing everyone one board and the occupants of a building it ran into, leaving more than 200 people dead.