LONDON (Reuters) - Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said he could see the two separate European programmes working on new fighter jets and combat air systems being combined in future or at least designed to work together.

Britain, Italy and Japan said in December they were setting up a joint company to develop, design and build an advanced stealth jet, named GCAP, while France, Germany and Spain are working on the rival FCAS project.

Defence experts have long speculated that there is not enough money or potential orders for the rival programmes.

Faury said on Wednesday that some form of combination would make sense.

"I think there's really room to do things in a smart way," Faury told reporters. "Each and every country could contribute its financial and technological capacity to a bigger programme for Europe, because that's what we need at the end."

He said the jury was still out on whether that may happen, but he believed, given budgetary constraints, governments could in the "next couple of years" come together to discuss bringing the programmes together in some way.

"The governments that are working on FCAS and GCAP need to sit down at the point in time when they have a clear view on what is FCAS, what is GCAP, what they want to achieve ... and see what they can do better together," he said.

The timeline for such talks would be the next couple of years, by which time the technology phase is likely to complete. But any plan to bring the two programmes together would not be easy, he said.

"If you have too many players, it's a difficult thing," he said.