Of all the world's flag carriers, Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS) is at the top of the list of those wishing for a speedy end to the first year of the new millennium. The Stockholm-headquartered SAS is locked in unparalleled soul searching over its future.

This year alone SAS has had to face threatened boycotts, investigations by competition authorities and a profits slump. Most intriguingly, the government has also signalled a possible sell-off of shares in the airline. Sweden's investment banking community has been forecasting, wrongly as its happens, the advent of a wholly privatised SAS since the early 1990s.