Q: how do you run a small airline in the US market?
A: Start with a big one.
There must be a reason several large airlines - which HAD lots of cash - are going south. And those guys are on the spot - it would be several orders of magnitude harder, running it all from Sydney.
But this is the funny bit - this thread is about QF buying into the US; there's another one about QF buying into SQ... didn't they raise the cash (primarily) to buy new airframes??!! (Oh, and maybe take a chunk of NZ).
There's a biiiig difference between taking a bit of our cousins 3 hrs across the ditch, as opposed to trying to grab something 7 or 14 hours away!!!