frigatebird, the point I was making was not that "everybody does that", or that it's right or wrong, but that Ansett was making huge profits and they were being sucked out by the owners.
It wasn't a case of not making any money that sent it down the drain; it was a reluctance by the then Minister for Transport, John Anderson, to allow SQ to buy it as that would have killed QF stone dead.
There were a number of factors, of course, but the profits showed that even with mismanagement, it was still a hugely profitable organization. You don't discharge
$1.2 Billion off debt without the ability to generate profit. It is, after all, profit by another name; if it hadn't been taken off debt, it would show up on the balance sheet as profit, or as a finance chap in AN told me, not profit but operating surplus. Call it whatever you want, but it is profit.
AN had been making that sort of profit all along, but it was sucked out by Newscorp and TNT.
For the record, I thought Abeles was a good guy to work for. In the '89 thing, he did whatever he needed to do to run the business. He had an obligation to the shareholders to do so. Unpalatable to crew it may have been, but it was them or him. He was so far ahead of the AFAP in contingency planning that he was lonely. He made them look like rank amateurs, which in retrospect, they were.