The programme was a genuine 50/50 collaboration. Dassault-Breguet built the forward fuselage, Dornier built the wings and rear fuselage, and Belgium’s SABCA joined in on components; final assembly lines ran in both France and Germany. The clever part was the split specification: rather than compromise on a single jet that suited neither air force, the partners agreed a common airframe and engine and then diverged on nose, avionics and armament.

France’s Alpha Jet E (“Ecole”, school) kept things light and forgiving for student pilots. West Germany’s Alpha Jet A (“Appui”, support) added a nav/attack system, a laser rangefinder option, a 27 mm Mauser cannon pod and the plumbing for bombs and rockets. It is one of the cleaner examples of a multinational defence project actually delivering two tailored aircraft from one shared design — and doing it on time.

The Larzac 04 was developed jointly by France’s Turbomeca and SNECMA specifically for this class of aircraft. Each engine is a compact two-spool turbofan giving around 13 kN of thrust — not much on its own, but the pairing gives the Alpha Jet genuine twin-engine redundancy. For a trainer, that matters enormously: an engine failure on take-off or in the circuit is survivable, letting instructors push students harder than they safely could on a single-engine jet. The bypass design also sips fuel compared with the pure turbojets it replaced, keeping the cost-per-hour low across fleets that fly constantly.

Look closely and you can tell the two apart by the nose. The French Alpha Jet E has a rounded, deeper nose optimised for docile training handling. The German Alpha Jet A has a sharper, more pointed nose housing attack-oriented kit, and it carried a serious punch: a 27 mm Mauser BK-27 cannon in a centreline pod, plus bombs, rockets and Magic missiles on underwing pylons. West Germany bought 175 of the A model to fly low-level close air support against a feared Warsaw Pact armoured thrust — a role it held until the Cold War ended and the fleet was declared surplus.

As a Cold-War government programme, the Alpha Jet never had a clean open-market list price; period estimates put the flyaway cost in the low single-digit millions of dollars, but treat that as an order-of-magnitude figure. What is better documented is the second-hand and civilian market: surplus ex-military Alpha Jets have changed hands for a few hundred thousand to a couple of million dollars depending on condition and hours, which is part of why they are so popular with private warbird owners and adversary-air contractors. Operating costs are far lower than a frontline fighter — one reason the type has found a long second life outside the military. Any precise dollar figure attached to a specific airframe should be read as an estimate.