After 24 years of service in Portuguese Air Force colours, the Alpha Jet disappeared forever from the skies of Portugal at the end of January. Stefan Degraef assesses the type’s last years of operations.
Portuguese Alpha Jets
Until recently, the modern infrastructure of Base Aérea No 11 (BA11) at Beja was a hive of activity. For the Força Aérea Portuguesa (FAP, Portuguese Air Force), the resident Esquadra 103 ‘Caracóis’ (‘Snails’) was where future fighter pilots were made.
Intense study at the FAP’s Academia da Força Aérea (Air Force Academy) and successful basic training on the propellerdriven TB-30 Epsilon permitted the fliers entry into ‘103’. A typical morning at the base found the young jet pilot trainees preparing intensively for the demanding flying programme on the Alpha Jet. Vital checklists were studied, and students trained to Pavlovian perfection in the squadron’s flight simulator.
BA11 history
From the mid-1960s, Beja – located in the country’s rural southeast Alentejo region – was run by the West German Luftwaffe and hosted frequent low-level training detachments by RF/F-104G Starfighters and F-4F and RF-4E Phantom IIs. Until its transfer to the FAP in 1993, the base also housed a Taktisch…
