“We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

That’s pretty funny. She’s basically saying

“It’s better to build important things with tools you can’t examine for yourself.”

SAS claim to have over 40,000 customer sites worldwide.  The news article claim 250,000 people use R regularly.  The difference here isn’t in the numbers of users, it’s that, with R, every user is a potential developer.  SAS can’t possibly compete with that.