NBMR-1 was issued in 1953–54 and asked for a near-Mach-0.9 strike fighter light enough to disperse to grass and damaged airfields, cheap enough to buy in quantity, and able to loiter over a battlefield up to roughly 175 miles away. Twelve companies submitted designs; three finalists were funded under a NATO cost-share (the United States paying half): the Fiat G.91, the Breguet Br.1001 Taon and the Dassault Étendard VI. The Folland Gnat was rated brilliant but too experimental.

Fly-offs at Brétigny-sur-Orge in 1957–58 went to the G.91. Yet the political dream fell apart: France backed its own designs, Britain its own, and most members bought nationally. The “standard NATO fighter” ended up flying with just Italy, West Germany and Portugal — a reminder of how hard true alliance standardisation really is.

Barred from military aviation after 1945, West Germany re-entered combat-aircraft production by licence-building the G.91. Assembly was handled by the Flugzeug-Union Süd consortium of Dornier, Messerschmitt and Heinkel, and together with Fiat-supplied airframes the Luftwaffe fielded around 344 aircraft — mostly the cannon-armed R/3 and the T/3 trainer. These were the first jet warplanes built in Germany since the war, making the little Gina as much an industrial rebirth as a piece of procurement.

By the mid-1960s the single-engine Gina was running out of growth, so Fiat replaced the lone Orpheus with two afterburning GE J85-GE-13A turbojets, each about 18 kN in reheat. First flown on 27 December 1966, the G.91Y was longer, heavier and carried about a third more internal fuel — giving markedly better range, a much higher climb rate and the survivability of a second engine. Only Italy bought it, operating roughly 65–75 into the 1990s. It was almost a new aircraft built on the old layout.

The G.91 was built under NATO cost-sharing and national defence budgets in the late 1950s and 1960s, never sold on an open dollar market, so a firm flyaway unit price simply is not part of the public record. Its whole design brief was to be cheap — a mass-produced, austere-field strike fighter deliberately kept simple to buy and maintain in quantity. No credible cost-per-flight-hour figure exists for the type in open sources either. Any precise dollar figure you see attached to a G.91 should be read as an estimate, not a sourced number.