The mining contracts are quite lucrative financially and will be for the foreseeable future.
Removing the entire cost layer of VARA and everything single thing associated with it, essentially shutting it down, and operating these routes with Mainline 737s, would still be quite a highly profitable operation.
A lot of doors will open with the new single fleet run venture. Costs will drop like a rock. VARA had so so many layers of cost.
Its fairly obvious the future of Virgin is just 70 737s. That’s it. Anything else that is not associated be with these 70 machines is dust.
While there is big numbers involved in Mining Contracts I'm not sure how big the margins are. Given the amount of competition in the mining market I would suggest that there isn't much in those operations. Obviously the on carriage is probably where the value lies for the domestic airlines. In reality noone really knows what the true value of the F100 is except the accountants. Whilst the 737 carries many more passengers for the same if not less fuel burn, is more reliable, the finance cost of the machines is considerably higher. You can't just have 180 seat aircraft sitting around waiting, while if you own an airframe outright it really doesn't matter. I would suggest that if it was cheaper to get a 737/A320 and just fly it to a mine 2x everyday, then everyone would be doing that as they are a very common airframe to source worldwide and are much more efficient to operate. The fact that all operators run F100's would suggest that a all 737/320 fleet is probably not going to be competitive.