Werff sold out SAS as a free standing airline to the detriment of Scandinavia

He didn't after all manage to save SAS as SAS. Instead he sold out to Air France KLM, possibly in hope of a top position in his home country Holland. 

I suggested already before he was hired that SAS needed a Scandinavian to be saved because only a local would understand SAS within the Scandinavian market and just as importantly be comitted to save it as SAS and not just a disappearing part of a bigger concern.

But few in Sweden and nobody in Norway saw the value of a dedicated airline competitor in the Scandinavian market. Norway have now this year alone lost 3 of its 4 independent airlines. And the ticket prices have skyrocketed accordingly. A few low cost airlines in and south of Oslo is not going to solve that problem. And with a slow moving and bureaucratic Avinor tht think the solution for lost income is piling even more taxes onto prices, has obviously never learned the business basics about how increasing prices reduces demand and therebye income at a certain stage of the curve.

Increasing flying taxes for environmental reasons and putting billions into trains is not going to be viable since the cost of the latter is going to be enourmous for the public purse compared to the formet that is an income stream. Something seen on both the decades proposed northern Norway railway and HS2 in Britain. Both now scrapped, again. The northernes there should have demanded they started in Manchester and built southwards instead of the sink all the money in a hole in London and then stop shortly thereafter.

SAS was needed for competition purposes. The canadian Ben is not going to ever understand the need for mainline airline transport north of Oslo or in provincial Sweden.

The only reconciliation is that an airline like Flyr was needed. But not one that spends its capital before it gets of the ground and even more while its waiting for better times. Better times came but Flyr's management wasted the money on not flying (winter 22/23) and preparing for summer 23 so never reached them. 

Hopefully another will raise from the ashes now that the bleak future of SAS in northern Scandinavia is mapped out. Including the closing of the important Trondheim-Stockholm alternative to the Trondheim Copenhagen feeder route. Constricted Amsterdam and far away (and now itchy) Paris is never going to be an alternative hub for Scandinavians going sample west.