THREE years of talks between Boeing and the partners of Europe's Airbus Industrie consortium about jointly building a new generation super-jumbo aircraft are formally over.
The arch-rivals, which finally decided it would be impossible to work together, now look set on building their own 600 to 800-seaters despite the large development costs and warnings from analysts about a limited market for such aircraft.
A source close to the Boeing-Airbus talks said the joint study, code-named FLA for Future Large Aircraft, came to an official end last month when the Airbus partners met in Europe and declared it 'futile' to continue talking.
United States-based Boeing was immediately informed of the decision, the source said, and no final meeting was held.
Airbus, which is a joint venture between Germany's Daimler-Benz Aerospace Airbus, France's Aerospatiale, British Aerospace and Spain's Construcciones Aeronauticas, was not party to the talks in its own right.
Since January 1993 the two sides had been studying the feasibility of jointly developing a double-decker VLCT, or Very Large Commercial Transport, and were negotiating the thorny issues of who would build such a jet and how a joint entity would be set up that would not breach anti-trust laws.
In July last year the two sides met in New York and decided to suspend their joint project for six months while they made a final observation of the market through talks with airlines.
