The Qantas profit result released this morning has turned out to be a bit better than the doom-ladened warnings from CEO Geoff Dixon and his management team predicted.

And as usual, like Chicken Little, there’s a forecast of tougher times ahead for one of the world’s most profitable airlines, with Dixon saying it will be hard to match last year’s profit in the current financial year.

But given the acceleration in fuel prices and not much prospect of respite over the next two years, there might be a large dollop of realism in Dixon’s comments this time.

The airline has managed, with the help of ticket surcharges, to ride out the past year’s fuel price hikes, increased competition, terror threats, the Boxing Day tsunami and slow moving trade unions.

Those higher fuel prices cost Qantas an extra $489 million in the year to June, but earnings before tax rose 6.5% to $1,027 million to top the billion dollar market for the first time, and were up 17.8% to a record $763.6 million after tax.

Jetstar also moved into positive earnings territory and had efficiency gains of more than half a billion dollars.

But the sting was buried in this statement from Dixon: “While further reforms in the business are under way and coupled with the high fuel price, we do not expect to achieve the same level of profitability in the current year.”

It was a comment that sort of echoed the forecast a week earlier from Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, delivered on the back of a record $4.4 billion net profit result – don’t get comfortable just yet.