the yearly profits which could be in the billions if they play their cards right
Have a look at the profits Qantas were bringing in pre covid.
They weren't bringing in billions regularly (in fact only once, in 2016, 2 years after a 2.8 billion loss), and there was some pretty "imaginative" accounting across the Qantas Group to even get the figures they did in the other years.
Meanwhile the opposition now has more debt than virgin did when it went into administration.
It's just taken them longer to run out of "imaginative" accounting ideas, but...they haven't ended up in administration, or sold off, so they must still be doing something right. VA are very, very lucky to even still be in existence