Stupid,
Actually if you read the series of posts, I was referring in particular to the Dash-8 hourly price, which is fairly common knowledge throughout the FIFO industry.
Not the 146 hourly lease rate!
(Which is surprisingly high in comparison to other types I might add)
The point I was making is that if you CHARGE an hourly rate for your aeroplanes that does not exceed your hourly COSTS, you may as well not have bothered with the contract because you are going to lose money
Other, more educated types, such as journalists and salesman, can't see that running at a loss for YEARS is not the smartest way to make money. Sure go in with a cheap price to get the work when you are getting established and you have other streams of income (Airlink) but when it goes on for years to shifts from cunning salesmanship to utter stupidity.
When you then pull the rug out from the cash producing side of the operation (Airlink) you don't have the backup anymore and the operations where you went in cheap to get the work now have to stand on their own feet.