Who will buy - Virgin Australia ?, page-82

Yes you can write off depreciation off tax. QANTAS did that when they announced that 'massive' loss and so did Borghetti on one of his last years of tenure. QANTAS wrote off the value of their international fleet, mainly the 747s. They were written off as non-cash impairments. However you have to be making profit and paying tax in the first place to take advantage!!

It was a bit of red flag last year when VAH wrote off the value of those tax credits because they knew they were not in a position to be making profit to take advantage of said tax credits. Its all in last years finanicals if you google it.

Old planes are ok if the fuel price is low and you've written them off. Because if you've written them off, they make excellent charter machines. You can have them sitting around doing nothing except only fly when profitable because they're not costing you anymore. The other thing you can do with them is cut a hole in the side of it and make it into a dedicated freighter. VAH looked at doing that with their two B737-700s. the smaller versions. They only have two of them. Ironically that would have really helped now if they had them! Air NZ are considering cutting a cargo door into one of their 777-200 aircraft as that fleet is looking like it's going to be retired out of all this...