Financially-troubled Dubai is cancelling orders for about 50 airplanes with Europe's Airbus and US Boeing, dpa reported according to information available on their websites Friday.
Dubai Aerospace Enterprise (DAE), a state-owned company, has struck orders for 18 Airbus A 320s and seven A350s.
It also appears to have cancelled orders for 15 Boeing 787 Dreamliners and 10 Boeing 777s. Boeing did not indicate who had cancelled its plane contracts, but comparison with earlier data indicates it was DAE.
The Airbus orders were valued at about 3 billion dollars while the Boeing orders added up to more than 5 billion dollars.
The emirate of Dubai is deeply in debt over its vaunted and ambitious real estate projects, and hopes to counteract some of the burden by cancelling orders for Emirates airlines, according to French media.
DAE had ordered 70 mid-range A320 jets and 30 long-range A 350- 900s. An Airbus spokesman declined to comment on the cancellations, but referred to the actual order book posted online.
Airbus SAS has suffered 41 order cancellations this year so far after signing contracts for 286 planes through the end of July, Bloomberg financial news service reported.
Boeing on Thursday declined to comment on cancellations of 26 jets that showed up in its weekly tally of orders. A contract for 15 Dreamliners was removed yesterday from the planemakers online backlog listing for DAE.
For the year so far, Toulouse, France-based Airbus delivered 298 planes, compared with 263 for Boeing. Airbus is targeting about 500 plane deliveries this year, up from 498 last year. Boeing on July 28 said it expected to deliver as many as 465 planes this year.