Italy set the requirement first — a light attack and reconnaissance jet to replace the G91 and F-104G from the 1980s. Aeritalia and Aermacchi teamed up to build it, but the numbers Italy needed alone made the programme expensive per aircraft. Brazil, facing a parallel need and keen to grow Embraer into a maker of combat aircraft, joined in 1980–81 and took a full design-and-production share. The partnership spread development costs, opened a second market and gave Brazil priceless experience, while letting Italy field a modern jet it could afford. The trade-off was complexity: two air forces with different needs (Italy wanted the 20 mm M61 cannon it could not export to Brazil; Brazil fitted twin 30 mm DEFA guns instead) and two assembly lines an ocean apart, all building what was essentially the same aircraft.

It is tempting to see the AMX’s modest top speed as a weakness. It was a choice. A close-support and interdiction jet spends its life at low level, hauling bombs to a target and loitering over friendly troops — not chasing fighters. A single, proven, non-afterburning Rolls-Royce Spey 807 gave the AMX long range on internal fuel, a light logistics footprint, high availability and low operating cost. Adding a second engine or an afterburner would have raised weight, fuel burn and price for capability the mission never needed. The design instead put its money into avionics, a stable weapons platform and, in later Italian and Brazilian upgrades, precision-guided weapons and modern sensors.

Because the AMX contained US-origin technology — from the licence-built Spey to avionics and the M61 cannon — its exports needed American approval. That is why Brazilian A-1s carry twin 30 mm DEFA cannons rather than the M61 Vulcan fitted to Italian jets: the US would not clear the Vulcan for Brazil. The same dependence later killed a deal. In 1999 Venezuela ordered a batch of AMX-ATA aircraft, but the US Congress blocked the sale on the grounds that the jets included American technology — and, by the era, the relationship with the Chávez government. Without US clearance the aircraft could not be delivered, and the order collapsed.

The AMX was designed around affordability as much as capability, and its single non-afterburning Spey is the clearest expression of that. A one-engine, subsonic jet burns far less fuel and needs far less maintenance than a twin-engine supersonic fighter, which is exactly why Italy and Brazil chose the layout for a workhorse strike aircraft they intended to fly hard for decades. That said, no reliable public cost-per-flight-hour or firm flyaway unit price exists for the type: it was a state programme split between two governments, never sold on an open dollar market, so any precise figure you see should be treated as an estimate rather than a sourced number.